garage door
What to Do About Noisy Garage Doors!
Loud garage doors are annoying, embarrassing, and can be a real pain.
There are many ways that you can greatly reduce the noise from a door, and most of the time you do not require professional help!
First you need to identify what type of door you have.
The first question is whether or not your garage door is the original one installed on your home. If the answer is yes, and your home is 5-9 years old, there are many items that can be serviced and need to be considered.
Homes that are an average age of 5-7 years old generally have builder grade overhead doors installed. Almost always these doors are installed (for cost and profit reasons), with one spring, plastic rollers with no bearings, and plastic bushings. These are notorious causes of garage door noise.
Step one, buy a can of silicone lube at your local Home Depot, or Lowe’s. Apply it pretty liberally to the spring, rollers, and hinges.
Next is a little tricky. You want to look for a black or white bushing that enters the end of the spring that is attached to the wall. DON’T TOUCH ANY OF THE BOLTS! There is an average of 160-220 lbs of force [more]
Safety Matters!
June is Garage Door Safety Month. It’s a reminder to make regular safety checks on your garage doors. Educating yourself and your children on correct use and operation as well as taking proper care of your garage door will help you avoid unnecessary accidents and loss of life.
Here are a few precautions to keep in mind:
Safe distance – Garage openers and wall control units should be at least 5 feet away from the floor, and the door opener control button should be high enough that small children cannot reach it.
It’s not a plaything – Children should not, at any time, be allowed to play with the garage remote control or any part of the door. Hitting the door with their hands or even a soft object may cause the interior mechanism to loosen and the door to malfunction when you least expect.
Familiarize yourself with the manual – Read the door’s instruction manual and understand the door’s emergency release feature so that in case of an emergency you’ll know how to operate it.
Monthly visual inspections and maintenance checks – At least once a month, inspect your door and its component parts for wear and tear. Pulleys, cables, springs, and rollers may [more]
Garage Door Check-Up
Garage Doors are amazing if you think about it a bit. A large, flat panel is rotated up and down either in sections or one big flat plane at least a few times a day without any problems. Well, that is as long as you do some maintenance on your door.
Are you even aware you should do maintenance on your garage door? Well, you should if you want it to last. The first thing to check is lubrication. Regardless of the type of system and door you have, something does the pivot and pull when the door goes up or down. This means you should lubricate the chain on the opener and the pivot points on the braces that pull up and lower the garage [on the outer edges].
Next, check the springs on your door. Look for signs of rust and sag. If you see them, you are better off replacing the springs before they break. If the break, the door can literally be bent out of shape since one side of the door will be supported by a spring while the other sags. This will knock your door out of shape [more]
JUNE: IT’S GARAGE DOOR SAFETY MONTH!
The International Door Association and the Door & Access Systems Manufacturers Association have designated June as Garage Door Safety Month.
The International Door Association and its affiliated dealers will be working to increase awareness of the possible hazards of garage doors and automatic opener systems, and the need for periodic inspection and maintenance to keep them safe. Give your garage door a safety check to insure it’s in proper working order by using these ten garage door safety and security tips.
1. Make sure garage door opener control button is out of the reach of small children.
2. Do not let children play with garage door remote controls.
3. Consult the owner’s manual and learn how to use the garage door’s emergency release feature.
4. Visually inspect the garage door each month. Look at springs, cables, rollers and pulleys for signs of wear. Do not attempt to remove, adjust or repair these parts or anything attached to them. A trained door repairman must make adjustments to these parts, which are under high tension.
5. Test the garage door opener’s reversing mechanism monthly by placing a 2 x 4 board or a roll of paper towels in the door’s path. If the door does not reverse after [more]
Garage Door Safety Tips
While working in the garage the other day, my next door neighbor was outside playing with his toddler son, in front of my driveway. Just as I was wrapping up my project and on my way into the house, I made sure the coast was clear, hit the button for the garage door and it began to close. The last beams of daylight were just beginning to disappear when I suddenly noticed out of my peripheral vision, a pair of legs, belonging to that toddler, standing about a foot from my closing garage door. I quickly hit the door button and fortunately for myself, the little toddler and his father, the door came to an abrupt stop. Talk about close calls!
According to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, garage door related accidents account for an astonishing 20,000 emergency room visits every year. The types of injuries range from crush injuries to fractures and worse. And those are just the incidents that were reported. If those numbers don’t impress you, then check these numbers out:
77.6% of garage door injuries happen at a person’s own home.
37.7% of injuries occur in the summer months. (June-Aug)
59% of injuries involve caught or cut fingers and [more]
How to choose and match exterior colours on your home, including the garage door
The challenge in choosing exterior colour is to find the right balance between standing out and fitting in.
Often the biggest colour decisions have been made by the time you get to choosing exterior paint colours: the brick, the stone elements, and your roof. To help you see these materials as colours, match each of them to a paint chip. This is a quick and effective aid to developing your home’s exterior palette. Add a paint chip for the roof and you are ready to go.
Next, choose your main trim colour , and when you do, be extremely wary of white. There is very little White in nature so stark white can look artificial and inelegant. Be sure that any whites you use are what designers call “toned” whites. These look off–white or warm grey as paint chips but will still look very white against brick and stone. They’re softer and more pleasing to the eye.
Make the laws of colour perception work for you when assigning colours to the architectural features of your home. Light things grab our attention and they also tend to look big (which is why some of us favour black workout clothing). Take stock of your facade, [more]
Residential Garage Door Openers: The New Trends
When examining the latest developments in the residential opener market, one characteristic is clearly paramount among the others.
Consumers are exhibiting a preference for openers that are quiet. Historically, the need for near silent operation hasn’t made the list of consumer demands. In fact, when major manufacturers polled consumers in an effort to uncover their desires, quiet operation didn’t even make the list of top 10 features on their wish list until recently.
So what’s driving this need for quieter residential garage door openers? There have been major changes to new housing structures over the past 15 to 20 years. For example, the detached garage has been replaced by an attached garage in an effort to give homeowners even greater comfort and protection from the elements. Common floor plan designs have the garage adjacent to living areas such as the family room or kitchen, which results in the noise generated from garage door openers being a concern.
As urban sprawl set in and space became more of a scarcity in many communities, home builders began to build two-story homes in an effort to increase the available square footage without using more land. This upward footprint usually takes advantage of the space above a [more]
Garage Door Innovation
A British company has an idea to make garage doors more energy-efficient and useful to a home: Make them generate heat.
Garage Door Restore, based in Blackpool, England, has created garage doors that use methods such as air-source heat pumps and solar panels to generate warmth. To create the prototype, the company partnered with a Lancaster University professor and two full-time students, who together will begin production.
The garage doors and the technology used inside them will be displayed at CUBE, the Manchester architecture and design center dedicated to developments in engineering. The firm will then take the display on the road to exhibit at different shows across Europe, where strict many government-imposed energy-efficiency requirements have spurred similar innovations.
Garage Door Restore is a branch network of contractors affiliated with manufacturer Complete Door Engineering.