Antioch winter weather will test your garage door and garage door opener

When did you last perform maintenance on your Antioch garage door? Have you ever had maintenance performed on your Antioch garage door? If you’re like most people, you probably fit in the latter category of people who have never had maintenance performed on their garage door.

Garage door maintenance is crucial to extending the life of your garage door, garage door opener and components. This makes all-the-more sense when winter rolls into Antioch.

Winter will test your garage door, garage door opener and various components. Whatever grease is in the bearings that guide the door panels up and down in the rails will thicken as the weather gets colder. There should be an ample amount of grease but that isn’t always the case. In fact, more often than not, it isn’t the case.

When the doors aren’t maintained, the rollers don’t roll as smoothly. The doors will bind up and stick. The degree to which the garage door drags as it moves up and down may seem almost imperceptible to the naked eye, but you can believe its effects are very real.

When the garage door doesn’t move up and down as easily it puts more strain on the motor of the garage door opener. If you could put your hand on the motor, and compare to when the door moved smoother, you might notice that the motor is getting hotter as it drives the door up and down without proper maintenance.

The rollers in the rails will also get hotter as they move up and down in their channels. Heat is not the friend of moving parts that come into contact.

As the lack of maintenance takes its toll, metal parts will strain and twist as they bear the extra burden of a garage door that is not as smooth as the day it was installed.

Maintenance of your Antioch garage door and garage door opener reduces the strain. Your garage door will last longer needing fewer repairs. More than that, it will continue to run smoother, quieter and operate with the speed you’re used to.

Overhead doors on trucks and trailers require the same care as garage doors

Garage door repair and maintenance services usually come to your home or office to repair or maintain your garage door. But what if the overhead door that you need to repair or maintain isn’t on your home or office garage? What if your overhead door is a mobile door on the backside of your trailer?

The overhead doors that roll up in the back of a truck or trailer are very similar to the garage door in a garage. Most of the parts are the same. The required experience and expertise to maintain and repair an overhead door in the back of a truck or trailer is quite similar.

If the overhead door in the back of your truck or trailer breaks down, you have a problem. Business can come to a screeching halt until the overhead door is fixed. This makes access to an overhead repair service that can respond quickly imperative. It also makes timely overhead door maintenance crucial.

Maintenance of the overhead door on the back of your truck or trailer will go a long way towards keeping you on the road and in service.

Imagine if your overhead door gets stuck in the upright position. What will you do with valuable equipment and merchandise in the back of the truck or trailer? How will you protect it?

What if the overhead door gets stuck in the closed position? How will you access equipment and merchandise in the back of the truck or trailer?

Most often, an overhead door in the back or a truck or trailer will break while in use. What if it collapses as you’re opening or closing the overhead door? What if the spring breaks and parts go shooting off the overhead door mechanism like bullets? When an overhead door breaks, someone could get hurt. That someone could be you. Embarrassingly, it could also be someone else.

Rather than wait until you require repairs, it’s a good idea to find an overhead door company that can maintain and repair the overhead door on the back of your truck or trailer before you have an emergency.

Maintenance is critical for overhead doors at your Crystal Lake business

Folks in Crystal Lake generally have one or two garage doors to maintain, though many neglect that maintenance until the need for maintenance turns to the need for repairs or replacement. You, on the other hand, have a warehouse of overhead doors to maintain. You can’t afford to allow yourself to fall behind maintaining all those overhead doors.

You understand that maintenance is inexpensive insurance to keep your overhead doors operating properly.

When an overhead door breaks down, it’s not just a matter of the cost of repair or replacement; it’s also a question of losing access to that particular loading dock. If the overhead door breaks in the upright position, you may also have to board up the opening until repairs to the overhead door are implemented.

Your overhead doors see a lot more use, and receive a lot more abuse than the garage door at the Crystal Lake home of someone nearby. Forklifts are liable to run skids into the rails for the overhead doors. There’s more ‘stuff’ in the air with your loading docks than folks generally see in the garages at their homes. The doors themselves will experience strikes from forklifts and other equipment.

Keeping the doors clean and properly lubricated is essential and a greater challenge with all that activity going on in your loading docks. And there are dollars depending on the continued smooth operation of your overhead doors.

The best way to ensure the continued smooth operation of your overhead doors is to establish a relationship with professionals dedicated to servicing overhead doors. You want someone who will be there when you need them, will have the tools, materials and equipment needed to maintain and repair your overhead doors properly, and will have the knowledge and experience to expeditiously do the job right.

On the other hand, you could wait until you have a problem and then scramble to find someone to help with your overhead doors. There are plenty of companies who service the Crystal Lake area. Unfortunately, they’re not all the same. Some are more experienced and have better reputations than others. It’s more difficult to determine the difference when you’re scrambling to find someone in an emergency.

Where are those leaves in your Wilmot garage coming from? How’s the weather stripping under your garage door?

Leaves on the concrete floor of your Wilmot garage can cause a slip hazard if they’re wet. Besides, when they’re wet, they’re so difficult to sweep up. You sweep but they stick to the floor and slide under the broom. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could keep them out of the garage?

As it turns out, for the most part, you can. Of course, when the garage door is wide open, the wind blowing through Wilmot is apt to blow leaves into your garage. But what about the leaves that seem to come in when the garage door is closed?

A garage door is designed to take a weather strip at the bottom so that the door can close tightly. There are a few designs of rubber stripping for the bottom of a garage door. In some cases, the weather strip is simply a flat strip of rubber with a lip on the outside. It’s about a quarter-inch thick and runs the length of the door. The lip is tipped downward so that, when the garage door closes, it is sure to push against the concrete and create a seal.

Other types are more effective. They’re generally the same but with different mounting methods. They employ what is essentially a tube of rubber at the bottom of the door. The tube is about an inch-or-so deep. Running from side to side at the bottom of the garage door, when the garage door comes down, the tube is pushed down onto the concrete creating an effective seal.

As with things rubber, the gasket at the bottom of your garage door will harden over time. Eventually, the hardened rubber is liable to crack. Cracks will grow and, eventually, pieces will break off. In the process, the integrity of the seal at the bottom of your Wilmot garage door will be lost.

A visual inspection of your garage door weather stripping will generally expose any problems. Check for cracks, breaks and hardness. Also, make sure the garage door is adjusted correctly so that the gasket fully engages with the concrete. Your probably want to check the gasket around the sides and top of your garage door, too. They help to seal out the elements.

Another indication of how your garage door weather stripping is doing is when you find leaves or water inside your garage. The weather in Wilmot is often brutal, especially with winter coming. 

Should you insulate your Lake Geneva garage door?

With the passing of Labor Day, the unofficial end of summer has passed. Inevitably, temperatures will grow colder and colder. You may not want to dwell on this fact too long just yet, but it’s coming. Though you can’t stop the approach of another Lake Geneva winter, you can take steps to mitigate the effects of winter.

One thing you can do is to insulate your Lake Geneva garage. If you keep your car in the garage, this will help make it easier for the car to start on those cold winter days while protecting the car a bit from the elements.

Maybe your garage is already insulated. But is the garage door insulated? If the garage isn’t insulated, and you decide it’s time to insulate your garage, don’t forget the garage door.

Garage doors are often made of lightweight material so the garage door opener doesn’t have too much trouble opening and closing the garage door, whether that describes you or a mechanical device at the ceiling of the garage. Thankfully, they make materials to insulate your garage door that are lightweight, too.

Insulating the garage door helps to complete the process of keeping out the cold. Adding a heater to the garage can make the environment in the garage hospitable throughout some of the coldest days of winter. And the insulation will help to keep the cost of heating the garage to a minimum.

Insulation also has a sound deadening effect. But, if you only have insulation in the walls of the garage the garage door is the weak link in your effort to ward off the cold and sound from outside the garage (more accurately, keep the heat from escaping from the garage).

It’s also important that the weather stripping around the garage is in good shape. The heat will seep out wherever it can. If the weather stripping is porous, the heat will find the leaks.

One question before you start insulating your garage door is to consider the condition of your garage door. Is the door 10-years or more old? Can you see light in the daytime coming through the gaps between the garage door panels? If so, there air will pass through those gaps, too.

If your Lake Geneva garage door is too old, or in bad condition, it may not make sense to insulate the garage door. You might be better off simply replacing the garage door.

11 reasons your Woodstock garage door isn’t opening or closing

You’re chatting with a friend about making plans as you pull in the driveway of your Woodstock home. Without really thinking about it, you open the app on your phone that controls the garage door and hit the button that will start it rising before you even reach it. In fact, you’ve timed this pantomime to the point that you can just keep on rolling right on into the garage.

Today, however, you have to hit the brakes hard as you very nearly drive right into the garage door. ‘WHAT THE HECK HAPPENED?!!!’

It’s not what happened; it’s what didn’t happen. The garage door did not go up when you pushed the button. You were planning to run in and change before driving over to The Woodstock Square to meet your friend for coffee at Ethereal Confections. But you hit the button again and again and still it sits, not budging at all.

You don’t have time for this. You leave the car in the driveway and go around to the front door. You’ll have to worry about the garage door later. Actually, you’ll probably need to worry about the garage door opener later.

There are a number of reasons that your garage door isn’t opening. Here is a list of 11 possibilities that could explain the problem:

• Somehow, the plug is unplugged and there’s no power
• The limit setting requires adjustment
• The door is off one or both of its tracks
• A torsion spring is broken (without it, the door weighs too much for the opener to open)
• There’s a problem with your remote control or app
• A cable has snapped or is loose
• The disconnect is engaged
• The door is locked
• There is something in the way of the door so it won’t open
• The assembly requires a sensitivity adjustment
• The photoelectric sensor is broken or blocked

That’s quite a list of possible problems. Your best bet is to go through the front door and, if you have time, call a qualified garage door technician before you go meet your friend for dinner. Better garage door repair services offer emergency calls. Or, if it can wait, they’ll come out the next day and put the garage door opener, on your Woodstock garage, back in working order.

Grayslake garage door starts to open the closes indicates possible broken garage door spring

You get the feeling the garage door on your Grayslake home is messing with you. You push the button on your ap to open the garage door and it begins to rise. Bt then, as though you can hear the mechanism laughing at you, it reverses course and goes back down. This is not funny. It’s infuriating, especially if you have an appointment and don’t have time for fun and games.

You press the button again and, maybe it opens. Then again, maybe it does the same thing over again. What would cause the garage door opener to behave so rudely? Before you jump to the conclusion that your Grayslake garage door is possessed, there is a logical explanation.

If your garage door begins to open but then closes instead, the likely culprit is the spring above the door. The spring is designed to help you or the garage door opener to open the garage door by reducing the amount of weight that needs to be lifted. But if the spring is broken or worn, it can loose its strength. More and more weight is left for you or the garage door opener to handle.

This can trigger a problem with the garage door opener. You’ll notice this problem when the garage door begins to open and then closes again.

The first question to ask is the age of the spring above the garage door. If it’s more than three or four years old, it’s possible that the spring is worn. You might be worn too if you were called upon, repeatedly, to carry that kind of weight. Then again, if the door was properly installed in the first place, you may get considerably more years out of your garage door spring.

Whether the garage door spring is a little long in the tooth or not, it’s possible that the spring is broken. While some broken garage door springs are obvious, that’s not always the case; you may want to call in a garage door technician to inspect your garage door spring.

If you do have a worn or broken garage door spring, you definitely want a trained professional to replace the garage door spring. Someone choosing to replace their own garage door spring would want to have someone on hand to call the Grayslake EMTs when an accident happens. Considering the amount of energy contained in a garage door spring, even a broken or worn spring, the likelihood of injury or death is very real. This is not a DIY project. Be safe, call the pros.