What are the UV rays of the sun doing to your Lake Villa garage door?

The sun is incessant in its attack on your Lake Villa garage door. It bears down without mercy drying out the wood, fiberglass or metal and draining the color of the paint or material. It doesn’t care how your garage door looks and it doesn’t care about it’s effect on how your garage door works.

Have you ever seen a badly faded garage door in your Lake Villa neighborhood? Of course, you have. How did it get that way? Mostly, it got that way because of the sun.

There’s an ultra-violet component to the sun’s rays that are destructive. They’ll fade the paint on your car as sure as they’ll fade the paint on your garage door.

UV rays play a nasty game with the molecular structure of materials. They dry out the rubber weather strip around the garage door. But they don’t stop there. They go after the garage doors themselves.

The longer the sun bombards your garage door with its UV rays, the more brittle and less flexible your garage door becomes. Cracks can appear in your garage door whether it’s made of fiberglass, metal or wood. Overtime, your garage door would disintegrate. 

The color will fade, and a chalky substance will appear on the surface. Moving parts will lose their lubricants. And the longer you operate mechanical parts without proper lubrication, the more wear and damage they experience.

The first thing to do to protect your garage door from the harmful effects of the sun’s UV rays is to lubricate moving parts with sufficient frequency, and the proper lubricants. This will make a tremendous difference in the life-span of your garage door and garage door opener (keep in mind that the garage door opener has to work harder when bearings and hinges on the garage door are not properly lubricated).

Insulating the garage door will help to keep the sun’s rays from turning the inside of your garage door into an oven. But what about protecting the garage door itself?

You can protect your garage door by painting it with a paint or varnish that is resistant to the UV rays, such as a Valspar or similar product. You can also apply a protective film on the garage door.

You may also want to wash your garage door once or twice a year to protect it from corrosive materials.

If you’re choosing a new garage door, you want to choose a door with the aesthetic appeal you’re looking for, but you also want one that is easy to maintain. You can ask your garage door technician for tips about which garage door will work best for you in your area and considering the exposure of your garage door – whether it’s facing South, North, East or West.

The sun will beat down on your Lake Villa garage door and there isn’t much you can do about that. But if you know what it’s UV rays are doing to your garage door, you can take steps to protect the door.