What Should You Know About Repairing Garage Doors

Garage door repair may be very complicated issue, or may be fairly easy to understand and thus repairable by a homeowner. The first question to ask yourself is, what type of garage door do I have?

For instance, steel doors that are not insulated are usually the most inexpensive and easy to repair. (Steel doors don’t even require heavy maintenance like wood garage doors do) However, steel sandwich models, the ones that have steel panels on both sides of insulation, can be complicated to fix. Doors made out of materials like wood or fiberglass may be relatively expensive to repair, and more frequent than steel or aluminum, given their lesser durability.

Are Garage Door Repairs For You?

Before starting on any garage door repairs, examine the sliding mechanism of your garage doors, including the tracks and rollers. Make sure nothing is obstructing the tracks (such as dirt) and that there are not any loose bolts or screws. Other parts you might have to examine include the pulley system, tension springs and main garage spring in the center. Only the latter typically demands professional service, given the danger of adjusting this high-tension spring.

What can you do on your own to fix a garage door? Sometimes there may be a problem with the garage door opener. Perhaps the batteries need to be replaced. Remember to rule out simple things before progressing on to more complicated issues like misaligned doors or spring-tension problems.

Even when you repair garage doors on your own, it can be an involved process, so prepare to spend a good weekend working on such a project and bring along a friend to help.