With that new garage door opener, you’re feeling pretty secure about the contents of your garage. If it’s an attached garage, you’re even feeling more secure about someone using the garage as a point of entry into the house. Even if you’ve had your garage door opener for a while, you may have felt the same sense of security but for a longer time. The question is whether that sense of security was misplaced.
A creative thief, or someone else trying to break into your garage and/or home, has ways of getting around your sense of security. While video surveillance and an alarm system are not bad ideas, there are things you can do to make sure your garage isn’t the soft spot someone who wants to break in is looking for.
There’s a little-known term that could spoil your sense of security when it comes to garage doors and garage door openers. That term is ‘fishing.’ This has nothing to do with baiting a hook on a pole and dropping it in a lake. Rather, this has to do with overriding the security offered by your garage door.
‘Fishing,’ in terms of opening a garage door, involves pressing back on the top panel of a garage door so that someone can slide a wire, such as a coat hanger, with a hook inside. Then, they snag the disconnect cord. A little tug and they’re in.
Fortunately, not all garage doors are as susceptible to this ‘fishing’ technique. It’s not generally a difference between the manufacturers of the garage door opener though. Rather, it’s a question of installation.
If a garage door opener is installed properly, it’s virtually impossible to use the ‘fishing’ technique to break in. The trick is in the settings of the garage door opener. This refers to the stop points when opening and closing the garage door. Obviously, if the door is open, there’s a bigger question of security and ‘fishing’ isn’t necessary.
The trick is with setting the stop point of the garage door opener. To avoid fishing, when the garage door is all the way down, keep running the garage door opener down for a moment. This locks the top panel in place so that a linebacker would have a very hard time pushing the panel back.
There are other tricks nefarious individuals have for breaking and entering through a garage. We’ll get to some of those later. For now, when you bring your garage door down you’ll want to make sure it’s set properly. Then, you can even go fishing without worrying about someone fishing back at home or the office.
