Garage Door Maintenance 101

Jamie: 00:00:01

Welcome to Thoughts from the Crawl Space, a podcast where our goal as home inspection experts is to support and serve our community.

Whether you're a homeowner, home buyer, real estate agent or investor, we believe everyone deserves solutions to their homeownership challenges and inspiration along the way. Your path to success starts here. All right, pop quiz. What is the largest movable object on your property?

You might not think of it, but it's your overhead garage door. Something you don't think about on a day to day basis other than you hit the button, it goes up, you hit the button, it goes down. Right.

Well, today we're going to jump into the topics of making sure that door is safe, make sure it's operating properly. Maintaining your garage door is not just a matter of making sure it doesn't squeak and shudder on the way up and down.

Having a properly running, lubricated, functioning garage door is the key to your safety and your health, particularly if you have young kids or pets around. And so we're going to talk about that today and the ins and outs of what to do. First of all, routine inspection and lubrication.

This sounds simple and mundane, but it's very important. Lubricating your garage door every six months will be one of the best things you can do to keep it working properly.

When you think about your vehicle, what's the single most important thing you can do for your vehicle to reasonably assure it's going to maintain and keep on running for as long as you can? Well, of course, that's changing the oil. Changing the oil.

Depending what kind of car you have, 3,000 miles, 5,000 miles, some say go 10,000 miles, whatever you have. If you have a combustible gas engine, you want to change that oil.

On a garage door, you want to use a type of lube that's suitable for a garage door, WD40 or silicone. Those types of lubrication really don't hold up long term. And you want to use something like slick 50.

It's a lube designed for garage doors and it's going to come more in a, almost like a grease, you know, squirt type gun rather than a spray. And so it's thicker.

Just simply put, if you look at your typical garage door track, if it, when it was put in, if it was put in right, you're going to see spots right along where the wheels are, where there's grease. So what do you lubricate on a garage door?

Well, simply put, you're going to lubricate everything that moves, whether it's rolling or moving like a hinge. Whatever you have on your garage door that moves, you want to lubricate that.

So apply it liberally and make sure that you're hitting all the spots that need to be. Certainly contact a garage door installer if you need advice on how to do that.

If you don't want to do it and you want them to do it, or you need suggestions on what type of product to use on that Certain not every door is the same. I'll acknowledge that. But in general, you want to use that loo. So. So check out the hinges.

Hinges are connected to the door in some way, and most doors don't have a real thick skeleton to hold the screws or the bolts from these hinges by nature, most modern doors, anyhow, are pretty lightweight. Now, some older ones, and you can even still buy the wooden ones, they're going to be a lot heavier duty. They're going to pose more risk as well.

But whatever kind of door you have, you want to make sure that the hinges on those things haven't pulled away. It's not causing your door to flatten out as it goes up or pop or whatever happens when the hinges aren't working right.

So check the hinges, check the rollers, check the tracks. Are the tracks solid in there, connected to the garage framing? Or have they moved?

Has some car hit them on the way out, as some lawnmower hit them on the way out and twisted them a little bit and it's causing more stress. So just take the time to look at it.

If you just stop and take a minute to look at your garage door, tracks, rollers, hinges, it can go a long way toward helping you maintain your door. So what you don't want is you start the you hit the button and it squeaks. Going all the way up and it squeaks, coming all the way down.

Well, you got a. You got some issues there you need to deal with. You need to get things fixed promptly so you don't have a bigger problem coming down the road.

Number two, misalignment. In a jerky motion, your garage door should be smooth up and smooth down.

There's really no other way to say it when you get misalignment based on a variety of things. One, just easily use the more you use something, the more it's going to move, right?

And so you want to check it to make sure you don't have any sideways movement on it. One end hangs lower than the other in the open position. You want to make sure that when it goes down. It hits the same on both sides at the same time.

And we. We'll talk about alignment in a little bit, but.

Or the sensors in a little bit, but as far as alignment, you want to remove any debris, Check for bent or loose hardware. This can just simply be done by visual inspection. Look at it. Is it connected? Right. Great.

If it isn't, we need some service, and we have a problem there. So make sure you're checking the alignment and the jerky motion.

The alignment and the jerky motion, you remember, are just a symptom of the problem that's caused by something else. So we want to look at the cause and fix that before we have bigger issues. It's kind of like your car.

If your car is starting to exhibit some noises, and maybe it doesn't start like it should, maybe it doesn't break like it used to, well, that's an indication of something else is going on. So make sure you're addressing that on your garage door. Right along with that is number three, noisy operation.

So often due to worn rollers, hinges, lack of lubricant. Address these issues immediately. And we've covered.

Kind of covered this already, But I thought it was important enough that I put it as another point. That noise is a problem. Now, you have. There's certain kinds of garage doors out there with an opener that's called, like, a whisper drive.

Those things are, like, silent. But that's mainly talking about the opener motor. That's not talking about the metal on metal, which is what you have rollers on a track.

And so that's something that needs to be addressed. In addition, it doesn't matter what your garage door opener says. It matters what the metal on metal is actually doing.

And so think about back in the days when. Remember those metal slides that used to be in parks? And some of them are really long and or curvy.

And those were great if you had the right surface tension. Right. Remember the days when you used to take, like, wax paper, put it underneath you, and slide down and make the side slide super slippery?

That's kind of what we want here. We want slippery between the metal rollers and the metal tracks. So anytime you have irregular noises, something like that, you need to adjust that.

All right. A very important part of this is number four, spring and cable wear.

So based on, I guess, our inspections we've done over the years, I would say the vast majority of garage doors have those overhead springs, and they're under tension, and they really don't move too much. They pull that. They Help assist the door up, and they help lower the door down in a smooth manner. In other words, it's not a free fall.

But those springs have a life to them. Based on some research we've done, those springs, overhead springs generally have about 2,000 cycles in them.

So think about how often you use garage door. If you go out that garage door and then back in every day, 365 days a year, let's just say 300 days, maybe you don't do it on the weekend as much.

So let's say, just, let's pick a number. 250 work days a year, you go out that door, you come back in that door at the end of the workday, it's up, down, up, down twice.

That's 500 times a year. That means, in general, your spring is Rated for about 4, 4 years of use in that manner. And so these springs are really important.

And these are not springs that you want to adjust by yourself. They're under high tension, and you trying to adjust them is a recipe for an injury or worse. And so what you can do though, huh, look at it and see.

Look, there's a rust. I got four fraying. I got metal fatigue.

Some doors have springs along the side, and it would stretch and compress more like a normal spring that you think of, like maybe on a trampoline or something. All right, those can get metal fatigue.

And so in other words, when it stretches, even when it's back in its normal resting position, it'll be stretched in a certain area. Well, when you get metal fatigue like that, that's one step from breakage. Definitely don't want that.

Second, with those side extension springs, you want to make sure there is a cable going through the center of them, tied on both ends. And the reason for that is when those springs break, they can do a lot of damage. If they're not, they don't have some kind of containment system.

And so this cable, even if that spring breaks, it can't go anywhere because it has the cable in the middle of it, and it'll just break and kind of flop to one end. And that's going to be a big safety enhancement for you. So you go in, you check that for metal fatigue.

You're going to check the overhead spring for rust and then check the cables, the cable that runs down the side of your door to the bottom of the door, which basically is what lifts it up or what winds up as the springs help that happen. Look for any frayed sections, kinked sections, all it takes Is for one cable to snap, and you're. You're not going to open that door, all right?

It's just too hard to do it by yourself without that cable assist on there. So look for any kind of wear on that, and then check the opener and the sensor. The sensor. There's two kinds of sensors that I'm thinking of.

The sensors that go on the tracks at the bottom, they're designed to be 6 inches off the floor door, and that creates an invisible laser that if you break that, it'll stop the door from coming down. That's a safety feature for pets or humans, especially small children, maybe somebody shutting the door.

Kids, you know, running around, they're unpredictable with their movements. They run under it and get hurt by it, and we don't want that. So make sure your sensor is working properly.

And then the other sensor I'm thinking about is the sensing that the opener does when your garage door is put in. If it's put in properly, it should go down. It should slow down near the base and then gently close.

Just compressing the weather stripping a little bit. If your door is going down and all of a sudden it's a thud, you have a misalignment of the sensors in the opener.

There's usually some adjustment screws on it that you can adjust if you know what you're doing, that will help with that. So if your door is shutting very harshly or when it opens, when it opens, it should do the same thing slowly come to a close right before the.

The connection to the track hits the opener bolt. If it's slamming into it, that's a sign that your adjustment is not right on the garage door. And it needs to be. It needs to be fixed.

So check the opener and the sensors. So finally, weather stripping. The weather stripping is probably the most overlooked part of this door.

But you have weather stripping on the bottom, going all along the bottom. And that's what basically seals it between a, you know, a rigid material and a rigid material, which is concrete.

It's just a nice rubber gasket along there. It seals. It keeps rain out. It keeps mice out. It keeps whatever that wants to come in the garage out.

Well, that can get worn out over time, and you'll want to take a look at it. Sometimes you have to replace the whole seal. Sometimes you have to make some alterations. Maybe just the edges have worn off.

I've had this happen before where I just took a piece of foam and glued it to the bottom of the door, and so it compresses. Now and it seals those corners. It seems like the corners are always what wear out the first for some reason.

But all these things combined to really help make your door safe. We don't want you to have problems with your garage door. We don't want to make too much of it.

But it's crucial to your enjoyment of, I guess, everyday activity. And in and out, in and out, in and out. Now if you don't have a garage, this is fallen on deaf ears.

Maybe you will have a garage someday, but what you don't think about until it happens is what if the power goes out? You got to go to work. Still you don't have an open now to open the door. Well, how does that work?

Well, if your door is working properly, if the spring is tightened properly, you have a safety rope up top. This is, I didn't mention checking this, but check for that safety rope. It should be red.

It should have a red handle that will you pull that, that releases the door from the track, releases that arm from the track and then your door should be able to be open manually. And if your spring is set right, it should take no more than about 15 to 20 pounds of pressure to lift that up.

You think of a 15 or 20 pound dumbbell. That's not real heavy for most people, especially if you're using both arms.

You should be able to go to the center of your door, lift up and lift that door up, get your vehicle out and put it back down. Now if your door is not set right, if the springs aren't strong enough, that door might be so heavy you can't even lift it up.

And then you're stuck there until somebody can come help you pull that door.

I remember years ago on an inspection, I pulled the, I released the chain from the track and I was just going to check it manually, make sure it operated properly. And this was an old heavy wooden door. And the, it didn't have any. You typically don't have handles on the inside to grab a hold of it.

And so you kind of got to get cleared out of the bottom and grabbed underneath it or the lip right below the bottom. This didn't have either of that. And the house door to from the garage had locked automatically.

When I came out into the garage, I was locked in this garage and could, I could not open this door. This door was several hundred pounds, probably because of the nature of how big it was and the type of material.

And so I had to get really creative on finding a way to get a handhold under that thing.

Force my way out of that door, but it would not have been something maybe the average homeowner could do at a moment's notice unprepared to get out of their garage. So that's just one aspect of it. Obviously a garage door not working with the lasers come down on pets can crush or injure an animal or a child.

Don't want that either. So make sure you're taking these tips to straighten up your garage door.

As always, if you have a question about it, if you don't feel confident in doing it yourself, call us. For information call a garage door installing installation company. They can help you out of that as well. But we just want you to be safe out there.

Have a great day everyone. Thank you for listening.

This week you can catch up on the latest episode of the Thoughts from the Crawl Space podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube. For more information about Gold Key Inspection services go to goldkeyinspect.com.