Maintain Automatic Garage Doors for Safety

Your automatic garage door is probably the largest moving object in your home, and if you use it every day, you might open and close it more often than the front door of your house. It’s important to keep the garage door and its automatic opening system in good shape.

Here are some maintenance and safety tips for the garage door.

Keep the garage door’s remote control out of the reach of children. They could leave the door open and unattended, which is an invitation to thieves and animals.

Likewise, don’t allow your kids to make a game out of opening and closing the garage door, even when you’re supervising them. A garage door closes more quickly—and is much heavier—than you might expect and can present a serious hazard to a small child who gets in its way.

If your garage door has panels or sections, keep fingers far away. Closing the joints exerts enough pinching pressure to break or sever a finger. Consider investing in pinch-resistant door panels to prevent accidents.

Inspect the garage door a couple of times a year for wear and tear on springs, cables, rollers and pulleys.

Don’t adjust or repair a garage door’s moving parts on your own. It truly is a job for a trained technician.

Regularly test the door’s reversing mechanism—its ability to automatically reopen if something gets in its way while closing. To test it, place a two-by-four under the door and try to close it. If the door doesn’t automatically stop closing and start to reopen, call a garage door professional to repair it.

Replace any garage door opener purchased before 1993. Newer ones have updated safety features.

Disable your garage door before you go on vacation. Most models have a security switch on the wall console that allows you to render the remote useless.