Taking Care of Your Garage Door: The Basics
A garage door is one of the most important investments you will make for your home. It is such an important purchase sine it will be used on a daily basis to provide storage for valuable equipment and vehicles, as well as to ensure the safety and security of your home. Since it is such an important investment, it is but right that you take time to ensure that it is in good condition and not prone to damage and defects that may occur in time. One of the best ways to get the most out of a huge investment is to take care of a garage door on a regular basis. Here are a few tips to maintain the good condition of your garage doors.
Know the basic components
Of course, the cardinal rule of being able to maintain any kind of equipment is to be familiar with all its parts. Although the opening and closing functions seem simple, behind these are a great number of components working together smoothly to ensure that the garage doors run smoothly. Sectional garage doors, for example, have side tracks that run vertically along both sides of the garage door opening. If they get stuck at some point, you may simply check if some foreign objects became embedded on the tracks and remove them. Usually, when there are problems such as when the door cannot fully lift itself up, only a few minor adjustments is all it takes to make the door run smoothly again. If your model comes from the range of Hormann garage doors being popularly sold today, then these may come with a 10-year warranty that you can use just in case your garage door become defective at some point.
Clean and lubricate and all moving parts
The second basic tip in taking care of garage doors is to lubricate all moving parts. Garage doors use a chain drive, a belt drive or a screw drive, all of which have a great number of moving parts: screws, tracks, hinges, chains, etc. To keep the door in great condition, you need to lubricate all the moving parts on a regular basis. Start by using a penetrating solvent such as WD-40 or a citrus-based solvent on all the basic parts. Then, you may move on to the bearings on torsion-spring openers, and the pulleys on the extension-spring openers. Wipe everything clean and then use a 3 in 1 lubricant.
Check the weather stripping and the paint
Apart from the moving parts that work to open and close the garage door, you also need to check the garage door itself. For example, some sectional garage doors made of steel must be checked for corrosion and rust. If unattended, a small spot can become large and affect the integrity of the entire garage door. On the other hand, if you bought one of those Hormann doors made of high-class timber, you may still want to regularly check if no moulds formed on the wooden panels although these have been chemically treated with an anti-fungal chemical. Finally, since garage doors do not fit flush with the garage door opening, weatherstripping materials are commonly used to fill the gap in between. Thus, you may also check all around the door to see if the materials are still intact.
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