Maintaining your Garage Door
If your garage door opener is broken, you’ve immediately got several different problems looming on your horizon — the cost of the garage parts being one of the least of your concerns. If it’s stuck open, you’re looking at a home security issue that could lead to burglary or home invasion, an insulation and water leak that could damage any belongings you have stored in your garage, and of course, your car is in danger of being stolen! If it’s closed, then your car is in even more danger out in the open — and of course you have the inconvenience of being unable to access the contents of your garage from the outside.
But that assumes that the door is totally broken, and we addressed whole-door repair a few days ago. There are lots of / other small ways that garage parts can go wrong, and each requires its own little bit of maintenance.
The door goes up and down by itself.
Most likely, this is simply an issue of you sharing a bit of garage door opener bandwidth with a nearby neighbor. Follow the given instructions on how to change your system’s frequency, and this problem should vanish.
The door only closes halfway, then reopens.
This is frequently the result of a dirty or cracked lens on your garage door opener’s photocell safety system. The lenses are one of those garage parts that few people think to maintain properly. These systems are present to keep the garage door from closing on a car or a child — it is supposed to detect an obstruction and retract the door. If there is a problem with the lens, you might need to clean it with a dry clean cloth — or if it’s physically damaged, you may need to replace it.
Pressing the button on your garage opener does nothing.
One of the most common complaints about any garage door opener is that the garage simply stops opening when you push the button. This is one of the simplest garage parts to fix: a vast majority of the time, you simply need new batteries. If that doesn’t work, you simply need a new remote or to reprogram it.
The garage door opener doesn’t automatically stop if the opening is obstructed.
This is a particularly dangerous occurrence — doubly so if your door is also opening and closing unexpectedly due to a bandwidth overlap — as it can cause injury or death in children. If you notice this occurring, immediately contact your garage parts supplier and find it what it will take to get, at the minimum, a new safety mechanism put in.
Dozens of other people’s remotes work on your garage door opener.
This is a kind of a repeat from above, but it’s worth noting because it happens so regularly with cheaper models. Even if no one in your road is using the factory settings on their garage door openers, if you never change the bandwidth, that means anyone who has a factory-generic setting on their opener can use it to open your garage door. So make sure you change it!
By keeping these simple DIY repair tasks up-to-date and double-checking your garage parts at least once a year, you will ensure that your garage door opener remains a valuable asset to your home and family.
