What You Can and Cannot Do to Maintain Your Garage Door

There are a number of DIY projects that you can safely do around the home and only a few that you should stay away from. Working with your garage door springs is one task to avoid. There are a few areas of your garage door system that you safely work with. Leave the coiled springs to a garage door repair company. Here are the parts of the garage door that you can work with and why the springs can be dangerous.

The Anatomy of a Garage Door System

This is a complicated arrangement of cables, springs and pulleys used to counterbalance the weight of a heavy garage door so you can easily lift the door. Small casters attached to both edges of the garage door travel in steel channels that guide the door up and over the ceiling. Cables attached to the bottom edge of the door travel through pulleys to the coiled springs. The springs are under tension to make the door easy to lift. When all of these components are working together well, you can lift the garage door with one hand.

Maintenance Tasks You Can Do

Inspect the casters on the edge of the door. They should turn freely as the garage door moves up and down. If a caster is broken or jammed, replace it before it malfunctions when the door is going up or down and gets stuck in the steel channel. Unscrew the bracket holding the broken caster in place and take the caster to the home improvement store to find a match to replace it.

Wipe any grease, oil, and dirt off of the other casters and spray lightly with a silicone lubricant. Tighten any caster brackets that have become loose. Wipe out the steel channel and make note of any place where it is twisted or bent. The garage door company will need to replace that section of the channel before you have problems.

The remaining maintenance that you can safely do is to inspect the rest of the garage door hardware and report any problems to the garage repair specialists.

Inspecting the Garage Door System

Follow the cables from the bottom edge of the garage door up to the pulley attached to the channel, over to the pulley attached to one end of the spring, and back to the bracket at the top of the garage door opening. These steel cables should be straight, without bends or kinks, and with no signs of fraying. Check that the pulleys are not cracked or broken. Inspect where the pulleys attach to the end of the spring and where the other end of the spring attaches to the ceiling bracket. Look for signs of cracked connection points or where the connectors show signs of pulling away from the brackets.

The springs are under hundreds of pounds of tension. Should they slip off of their connections or the connections break, the spring can seriously hurt someone. A broken spring in an empty garage can fly across the room and punch a hole in the wall. Garage door technicians know how to work with these springs safely. Do not try to repair or adjust them yourself. If you see any signs of a problem, have a company come out soon to do the repair.

Do your garage door maintenance and inspection a couple of times a year. Have the garage door repair company come out and look at anything you think is a problem. If you're not sure if something is wrong, have the technicians come out anyway. Play it safe and never try to do a repair involving the springs yourself.