The Complete Guide to Garage Door Maintenance for Homeowners

The average residential garage door gets opened and closed about 1,500 times per year. That works out to be anywhere from three to five times each day.

With this in mind, it shouldn’t come as any surprise to hear that most homeowners put a lot of wear and tear on their garage doors. It’s why you’re going to need to get into the habit of doing garage door maintenance on a regular basis if you have a garage door.

By putting a garage door maintenance routine into place, you’ll be able to keep your garage door around for a much longer time. People can also avoid repairing garage doors as often as they might have otherwise by maintaining them.

Here is a guide to garage door maintenance. It’ll come in handy if you’re going to start making more of an effort to take better care of your garage door.

Limit Using Your Garage Door

As we mentioned back at the beginning, you’re going to put your garage door up and down quite a few times each year. For this reason, you should try not to use your garage door more than you have to.

Some homeowners will get into the habit of putting their garage door up and down almost every time they leave the house, even if they aren’t pulling a car out of their garage. You should try not to do this since it’ll increase the wear you put on your garage door.

Perform Regular Garage Door Inspections

Every so often, you should put your garage door up and then back down while paying close attention to how it’s operating. If there are any parts of your garage door that seem like they’re struggling, you’ll need to call on a professional garage door service to come out and help you get it working like normal again.

Far too often, people will only worry about their garage door when it isn’t going up or down at all. But if you sense something might not be quite right with it during an inspection, you should have someone take a look at it. It could stop a small problem from turning into a much bigger one.

Keep Your Garage Door Clean

Your garage door is obviously going to be exposed to the elements more often than not. As a result, the outside of it is going to get to be very dirty.

As part of your garage door maintenance regimen, you should pull out a garden hose and clean the outside of it off every month or two. It’ll make your garage door look so much better from the outside.

You should also make it a point to clean the inside of a garage door as well. It isn’t out of the ordinary for dust, dirt, cobwebs, leaves, and more to end up stuck to the inside of a garage door. They could make your garage door and all its various parts less efficient if you’re not careful.

Clear the Tracks for Your Garage Door

Your garage door will have a set of tracks that it’ll travel on when you put it up and down. It’ll be very important for these tracks to be completely cleared out so that your garage door can move through them with ease.

If gunk begins to build up on the inside of your garage door’s tracks, it could make it more difficult than it should be for your garage door to move through them. It could start to put a strain on your garage door’s parts before long and cause your garage door opener to start to wear out.

Lubricate Your Garage Door’s Moving Parts

Your garage door is going to feature a series of rollers, hinges, and other moving parts. You’re going to need to see to it that all these moving parts are properly lubricated.

If you ever hear your garage door start to squeak when you put it up or down, that could be a sign that some of these parts aren’t lubricated enough. You’ll need to lubricate them to prevent them from breaking down on you.

Test Your Garage Door’s Safety Features

Most garage doors will come with a set of safety features that are designed to prevent accidents from occurring. For example, your garage door likely has a safety feature that will cause it to auto-reverse if it senses that it’s going to come down on top of something that’s on the ground.

Most garage door manufacturers recommend testing out a safety feature like this at least once every month. You’ll get peace of mind knowing that this type of safety feature is going to work if you ever need it to spring into action.

Hire a Garage Door Company to Help

As you’ve no doubt noticed by now, there are so many garage door maintenance steps that you’ll need to take. It can be daunting trying to do all these things. You might also worry that you aren’t doing some aspects of garage door maintenance correctly.

A garage door company like R&S Erection of Richmond, Inc. can step in and help you with all your garage door maintenance needs. We can also do it while sticking to a garage door maintenance budget that you’ll be able to afford.

Make Garage Door Maintenance a Bigger Priority

As long as your home’s garage door is going up and down when you need it to, you might be under the impression that it’s working just fine. It might lead you to believe you don’t need to do garage door maintenance.

But to keep your garage door working like it is now, you’ll need to start emphasizing the importance of garage door maintenance more. It’ll be the only way to ensure your garage door stays in great shape for the long haul.