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. 

What to do when you back into your Crystal Lake garage door

It takes a few seconds for it to sink in, for you to realize it can’t be undone. You’ve backed into the garage door of your Crystal Lake home and the question now is how much damage was done and what to do next?

The first consideration, of course, is whether everyone is okay. This may or may not include your psychological disposition at the moment. The next question is whether you can or should move the car.

Depending on how much damage you’ve done, parts of the garage door could come crashing down if you move the car. You should carefully check the rollers to ensure they’re still in their tracks. Check the door panels to make sure they’re still connected. From a distance, look at the spring(s) to ensure they’re safely connected (those springs have enough strength to seriously injure or kill someone). You also want to check that the garage door opener is still securely mounted and won’t fall on your or the car.

Additionally, you may want to take a photo or two for the insurance company before you move the car away from your Crystal Lake garage door.

If you’re not sure it’s safe to move the car, don’t. Call in garage door repair professionals to make that call and to safely move the vehicle.

Now, assuming you’ve called your insurance provider (auto/home/both?), it’s time to consider securing the garage and repairing the garage door.

Your garage door specialist may need to order panels and other parts to repair the garage door. This means that they won’t, necessarily, be able to repair the garage door immediately. In that case, it’s a question of securing the garage door until they can.

If there wasn’t too much damage done, it’s possible that the damaged garage door can adequately secure the garage until repairs are done. But, if too much damage was done, the garage door specialist may need to construct a plywood structure to temporary secure the garage. In either case, you may not be able to use the garage door until repairs are done.

Repairs may include replacing the entire Crystal Lake garage door. If this is the case, hopefully, your garage door was older to begin with. In either case, trust your insurance agent to help with the financial aspects of the incident. Trust your garage door technician to straighten out the garage door.

Oh, and don’t feel too bad about it; you’re not the first person to back into their garage door.

Garage doors offer aesthetic opportunities to increase curb appeal for Wonder Lake homeowners

This garage door in Wonder Lake offers an awesome
painted scene as the homeowners have made the most
of their flush garage door.

Garage doors are 7- or 8-feet high and 9- to 18-feet wide. Some Wonder Lake garages have two garage doors. That’s quite a bit of space and an opportunity for aesthetic enhancement and great curb appeal. But many owners of garages haven’t taken advantage of those opportunities.

Garage doors come in different styles and made of different materials. There are flush garage doors that are designed to look like nothing more than a section of wall. There are other garage doors with framed panels. As for materials, some garages are wood, some are metal, and some are fiberglass. The latter are often made to look like wood.

A common garage door size in Wonder Lake is 8X16. That garage door offers 128-square feet of space. A home with two 8X10 garage doors offers 160-square feet of aesthetic opportunity. Any improvement has the potential to make a significant improvement in a Wonder Lake home’s curb appeal.

The aesthetic approach to a garage door can range from stri

ving to make it fade into the background – to be as unnoticeable as possible – to making it stand out while making a statement.

The Invisible Garage Door: this is the concept that the garage door should go as unnoticed as possible. Painting it the same color as the surrounding walls is the best way to achieve this effect. If it’s a flush panel door it may still standout. For instance, if the wall around the door is brick, unless you can give the door the appearance of brick (difficult to pull off), you can paint it the same color as the brick but it won’t be the same.

These homeowners have stained their garage door. The
result is absolutely fantastic.

If the walls have lap siding, once again, matching the walls will be difficult. Staying with the same color is probably the closest you’ll come to making the garage door disappear.

The Stand-Out Garage Door: rather than trying to hide the garage door, this is where you try to make the most of the garage door – to make it stand-out from the wall around it. Here, the options fall into two basic categories: accentuating the doors basic style or something more creative.

Accentuating the garage doors basic style might mean painting the framing on the panels and/or the panels themselves. It could mean staining a wooden garage door or painting a metal or fiberglass garage door to appear as though it’s stained wood.

Another option is to paint a scene or design on a garage door. In this case, a flush garage door may work best. The surface of the garage door is the canvas where you can do your magic.

Whatever you do to your Wonder Lake garage door, any improvement will improve your home’s curb appeal. That’s particularly important if you’re selling your home but nice even if you’re not leaving.

Protect Hainesville garage door weather stripping and it will protect your garage and possessions

Those shingles on the roof of your garage are there to keep the water out. They protect everything inside. The weather stripping around your Hainesville garage door is there for the same reason. If you keep the weather stripping in good shape it will help keep your garage in good shape, as well as everything you keep inside the garage.

The weather stripping is generally made of rubber and rubber is a petroleum product. That means there is oil inside the rubber. The sun, heat and cold speed the process by which the oil is dried out of the rubber. Overtime, and as a result, the rubber will shrink and crack. In time, the deterioration will be so complete that the rubber will crumble.

As the rubber deteriorates, water gains access. In the winter, this means that thawing snow and ice come through to do their damage to things inside. In the summer, particularly a monsoon-like summer such as this, the rainwater can get past the rubber weather stripping as it deteriorates.

One part of your Hainesville that you really want to protect is the bottom plate of the walls. Hopefully, this is raised from the floor, particularly since many garages are built today with a constant downward pitch toward the front of the garage. But, if the water has a chance to get into the wood around the walls of your garage it can cause the wood to rot and mold.

Items that you keep in garage can also suffer from rainwater that gets inside the garage. What do you keep in the garage? Can water damage it? These are good questions, particularly if your garage door weather strip is showing signs of wear.

If your Hainesville garage door weather strip is showing signs of wear, moving things off the floor is a temporary solution. The real answer is to replace the weather stripping around the door. And don’t wait too long. This is one wet Hainesville summer.

Sweep the cobwebs from that Gurnee garage door

And some lubrication and maintenance wouldn’t hurt

You might want to wipe the cobwebs off your Gurnee
garage door. Having a garage door technician come in
and take a look - do a little maintenance - isn't a bad
idea either.

Garage doors are among the most neglected mechanical devices in your Gurnee home. It’s not that folks intend to neglect them; it just works out that way.

It’s actually a tribute to garage doors and garage door openers that they can work so well, for so long, when maintenance is the farthest thing from their owners’ minds. For many people, in Gurnee or otherwise, their garage doors have never received any maintenance. And yet those garage doors still go up and down on demand.

The problem is that, reliable as they are, as with anything mechanical, the time will come when something will break. Even more inevitable is that imperceptible decay in the efficiency of their operation.

From day to day, you don’t notice that the garage door is making more noise than it used to - that it takes longer for the garage door to go up and down. If it happened all at once, you’d notice immediately. But the change is incremental and minute. How can you tell the difference when the sound only goes up by the fraction of a decibel at a time or it takes a fraction of a second longer to raise and lower the door than it did yesterday?

Maintenance will keep your Gurnee garage door and garage opener operating at their peak performance longer. It will help to stave off that inevitable day when parts break and require repair or replacement. In the process, maintenance is a highly-cost-effective way of saving money.

The day you need to replace your garage door, garage door opener, or parts of either of these mechanical devices, is the day you have to open your wallet wider than you wanted or needed. Garage door maintenance – garage door opener maintenance – are the keys to a long and efficient life for your Gurnee garage door and garage door opener. That maintenance includes using the proper lubricants strategically applied.

Is your Racine garage door opener sick or tired?

You can’t expect your Racine garage door opener to raise and lower your garage door with such frequency without it getting a bit worn out by the process. If you go in and out of your garage only once each day of the year, that’s 365 times that the garage door opener will open the door and an equal number of times that it will close the garage door.

Chances are, however, that, while there may be days when you don’t use the garage door, those days are infrequent. Instead, if you’re like most of your Racine neighbors, you probably use the garage door more often than once a day.

Think about it this way; you usually use the garage door five or six days of the week, leaving and returning from work. That means that you use the garage door twice on those days. If you work 250 days out of the year, assuming you have weekends off, you’ll still bring the garage door up and down 500 times.

What about weekends? How often do you go to the store, raising and lowering the garage door to get the car out of the garage? And then you raise and lower the garage door when you return. How about all the times you cut the grass or snow blow the driveway? How about when you garden or rake the leaves? How about all the times you take the recyclables out to the curb? And then there are all those incidental occasions when you have reason to use the garage door opener.

It’s not hard to imagine that your garage door opener will go up and down 1,000 times each year or more. Over a five-year period, that’s 5,000 times. A single-car garage door weighs about 125 pounds. If it’s insulated, the weight can be closer to 150 pounds.

Most folks in Racine have two-and-a-half-sized garages with double-wide doors (16-feet). If made of steel, those doors can weigh about 200 pounds without the insulation. With insulation, they’re often closer to 225 or more pounds.

Garage door openers commonly have ½-horsepower motors. Fortunately, the garage door comes with heavy-duty springs that help to carry much of the load. But we’re still expecting a lot from that garage door opener. They do an admirable job but, over time, it’s inevitable that they grow a little tired. They can get sick, too.

Garage door opener parts can break. Adjustments can slide out of adjustment.

The point is that, if your Racine garage door is getting a little long in the tooth, you may want to have it checked out by a qualified garage door technician. They can identify anything ailing your garage door opener and they can give a boost of energy to many tired garage door openers.