Preventive Maintenance Tips to Keep Your Garage in Optimal Shape

If you own a home that has a garage, you likely have run into issues with your garage door. Whether the door is abnormally noisy or has come off its tracks, having a broken garage door can be stressful and inconvenient.

While you want a professional to complete any repairs or replacements, there are a few maintenance tasks you can do yourself to help your garage door continue to function its best.

3 Garage Door Maintenance Tips

You can prevent many garage door issues with regular garage door maintenance. Check out these three tasks you can do yourself to help keep your garage door in the best shape possible.

1. Tighten Hardware

Opening and closing your garage can cause bolts and hardware on the door to loosen over time. This loosening is a normal occurrence that causes some common problems, such as throwing off the door’s alignment and preventing your door from functioning properly.

Tighten your hardware by taking a wrench and double-checking each bolt to make sure it’s secure. By doing this, you can help avoid potential damage to your door and an expensive repair bill.

2. Lubricate Moving Parts

One of the easiest and most important tasks to prevent garage door damage is to lubricate moving parts, such as the rollers and hinges. Your garage door opens and closes numerous times throughout the day, causing the metalworking parts of the door to rub against each other frequently. Over time, unlubricated parts can begin to cause wear and tear and keep your door from functioning properly.

3. Check the Balance of the Door

A common cause of your garage door opener not running properly is that your garage door is off balance. An off-balance door will cause a garage door opener to have to work harder than it should and eventually cause the opener to break due to strain on the motor. 

To check if your garage door is off balance, disconnect the power and pull the garage door halfway up manually. As you release the door, watch to see the speed at which it falls back down to the ground. If it falls too slow or fast, your garage door is off balance. 

If your garage door does end up being off balance, it’s best to leave the repairs to the professionals to prevent injury to yourself or further damage to your garage door.   

Call the Experts at Hunter Door

If you are unsure how to fix your garage door correctly or are unable to find the cause of your garage door issue, a garage door professional is one call away. Contact Hunter Door today to learn more!