|
|
Well, it’s spring and time for spring cleaning! Not only does this apply to cleaning out your garage, but also to cleaning your garage door. Yes, I said cleaning your garage door! And not only your garage door, but your garage door opener. Your garage door will not only look better once you have cleaned it, but it will operator better.
Since you are already doing your spring cleaning and cleaning out your garage and putting things into their places, now is the perfect time to clean your garage door, garage door opener, and all of their components! First lets start by actually cleaning the garage door. A bucket of soap and water are all that you will need for this step. I recommend using a large sponge, but a wash rag will work just as well. Scrub the outside of the garage door just like you would your car. If there are some marks on the garage door that will not come off with soap and water, try a degreaser or a little WD40. Of coarse after you use one of these products, you will have to go back with more soap and water because you do not want to leave them on your garage door. Next, move on to the inside of your garage door.
Now that you have cleaned the inside and outside of your garage door lets move on to rest of the garage door and the garage door opener. Let’s start at the top, literally! Get out your ladder and proceed to the garage door opener motor unit. Wipe off the cover of the garage door opener. Next either blow or wipe off the top of the garage door opener. There tends to be a lot of drywall and other dust to accumulate up here. Also, now is a perfect opportunity to inspect the bearing on the drive shaft if you have a chain or belt drive garage door opener. If you find a black powder around this bearing, you can be warned that you will need to replace your gear and sprocket assembly. Another warning to this is a loose chain or belt.
Once you have cleaned the garage door opener we can proceed to cleaning the garage door track, rollers, hinges and the garage door opener safety sensors. If there is grease on, or in any of these lets clean all of that off. Grease is NOT a good lubricant for garage doors! Next wipe off any dirt on the lenses of the safety sensors, and the sensors themselves.
After having cleaned your garage door and garage door opener, it’s time to do your maintenance. By maintenance I mean lubricate all the working parts of both units. All of the hinges, rollers, pulleys, bearings, and the springs need to be sprayed with garage door lubricant. Yes you can use other lubricants like silicone, WD40, or graphite, but the synthetic lubricant works the best. It does not accumulate dust or buildup like these other products. Also lubricate the chain and bearings on the garage door openers. Mission Accomplished!!!
Did your garage door or roof get hail damaged during the recent storms? Welcome to middle Tennessee! As you already know, storms can damage a lot of things with the high winds, volumes of rain, large hail, and lightning. Although most people’s experience is with the electrical problems that lightning causes to our televisions, computers, garage door openers, etc. The recent storms brought huge amounts of large hail that caused multitudes of damage to homes in what is know as the I40 corridor.
The hail from these storms damaged many homeowners’ roofs, siding, garage doors, vehicles, and other items. Although roof damage is obviously more serious a problem than damage to your garage door, with the threat of water leaking in where shingles have been destroyed, your garage door may be a focal point of your home! You really do not want your guests driving up to your home and wondering what all of the dents in your garage door are from.
Hail damage to your garage door will be covered under your homeowner’s insurance policy. When your insurance adjuster comes to your home, he will most likely start with the obvious, the roof and siding. These are the two most frequently damaged aspects of your home, but the garage door will take the damage as well. The garage door may not show the dents if you look directly at the door. You may need to stand at an angle to observe the dents in the garage door, depending on how large the hail was and how hard the wind was blowing.
Most likely the insurance adjuster will spot the damage, even if you have not! I have personally replace several garage doors that you would swear there was no damage to, untill you looked at just the right angle. If you were so inclined, many times you could fix damage this minor with a coat or two of paint. As a matter of fact, one set of doors that I recently replaced had chips in the paint from the hail and could have easily been repainted! However, if you are going to turn a lot of other claims and they are going to buy you a new garage door, then you might as well take them up on it! After all, they are going to raise your insurance rates after a major claim, so you might as well get your money’s worth before they do!
Whether you have a newly constructed garage, or an exising garage, garage door installation is going to be part of the process. If you are starting from scratch, then you can choose to build a garage with whatever style garage door that you would like. If you have an existing garage, then your choices may be limited, but you still have choices for your new garage door installation.
New construction generally allows for easy garage door installation. Most often there are not any obstructions to worry about. Also, headroom is generally adequate due to current builing codes. Another nice thing about new construction is that there is usually a good clean solid surface of drywall, or other material to ease garage door installation. Usually, the only wood work that you have to perform prior to the garage door installation is back jambs over the drywall to give you a solid work surface.
If you are replacing an older garage door, especially a one piece garage door, then the new garage door installation may be much more difficult than you expect. Plan on the the total job taking twice as long as you think it should! When dealing with older homes, there are always unexpected details popping up! I know that you did a preinspection before you purchased your new garage door, but most likely you missed something. Maybe you forgot the weatherstrip or the back hanging materials. Or, maybe you just mis measured somewhere. Hey, it happens to all of us, even the professionals!
Older homes typically do not have drywalled ceilings, which makes it easy to find the joists. However, most often the plumming, electrical, and air ducts are not concealed up between the joists as it was not required untill recent building codes. It may actually be that before you can begin the garage door installation, that you have to relocate an air duct or a pipe! Sometimes no matter how skilled the technician is, obstacles just have to be moved rather than worked around. This is especially true if you have a taller vehicle will be parked in the garage. You may not be able to lower the header of the garage door opening, or drop the back of the opener to get beneath a pipe. Pee traps are one the most difficult obstacles to work around, as they generally drop down about six inches, and what may appear to be pleanty of headroom is actually quite less.
Keep all of these ideas in mind before starting a new garage door installation. Take plenty of time to make all the proper measurements, including obstructions. Plan any woodwork that must be completed before the garage door installation. Be sure that you have all the appropriate tools and materials before begining. Most importantly, if you are not 100% sure that it will work, call a professional garage door installation company.
Have you ever wondered why some days feel like a repeat of another? Well, it feels that way to me just about every single Monday! I’m not sure why, I just know that it happens without fail every week! It is Monday all over again!
It usually starts with people calling over the weekend wanting to book a garage door repair for Monday, because they don’t want to pay for an emergency garage door repair over the weekend. Then, at a few minutes before seven on Monday morning, the phone begins to ring! People are getting ready to leave for work, and realize that they can not get their garage door to open! I’m not sure why, but it just about goes without fail!
There a couple of leading garage door repairs that happen on Monday mornings. Most of them are broken garage door springs. I guess the garage door must sit idle for the weekend, then bang! Either that, or I hear “I heard a loud noise in the garage yesterday, but I could not figure out what it was then!”. Then, they go to open the garage door Monday morning to leave for work, and the garage door will not open. They can not get the car out of the garage, and they are stuck! That’s when the phone starts to ring!
The next biggest problem is people running into the garage door! I guess that it’s Monday, and they are in a hurry or maybe they have a lot going on and they are not paying attention to what they are doing. I hear the same thing every time, “I hit the button on the remote, but the door didn’t open, I guess!”, or “I thought that the garage door was open far enough for me to get out!”, or “I guess that I forgot to open the door and didn’t look where I was going!”. But, it is always some variation of that! Sometimes the customer is lucky, and the garage door repair is as simple as placing the door back on track or rewinding the spring. However, many time they either need to replace the whole garage door, or at least part of it. The problem with this is that we have to come inspect for the garage door repair, then we have to obtain the replacement parts or the new garage door.
All these problems can ruin your day, and start they week off on a sour note! However, our business is built on being able to help these people with their problems! We specifically keep Mondays without any scheduled installations so that we can take care of your problem right when you need us. So, if you do have a Monday Morning Garage Door Repair problem please give us a call…. we are ready!!!
With everyone of us these days worrying about security, new home owners are regularly asking about how to change the frequency on their garage door opener. This is a smart thing to consider, especially if you are not sure or know that you do not have all of the remote controls that open your garage door. Also, it is not nearly as difficult to do as you might think. You are not changing the frequency, just the codes received from specific remotes.
The first part of the process is to get out your ladder and all of the remote controls that you want to program back to your garage door opener. You may also need a screw driver, or nut driver to remove any cover hiding the garage door opener smart button. Next, locate the smart button, or learn button, on the garage door opener motor. On a Liftmaster, Chamberlain, or Sears Craftsman unit, it will be a half inch square button that is either green, red, or purple. On most Genie units it is a small black button above the antena on the front face of the unit next to the light bulbs. Some units, including the Excellerator model, will have the smart button on the back of the unit next to where the low voltage wires connect.
Okay, so after you have identified the smart button, we will proceed to erase all of the existing codes that have been trained to the garage door opener. To do this, press and hold the smart button. An LED light will come on, right next to the smart button. Hold the button down for about five to ten seconds, until the LED light turns off. Then release the smart button. All of the old codes have been erased. Try using the remotes to confirm that this part of the process is complete.
The next step is to reprogram the remotes. Push the smart button and release. The LED light should come back on. Then press the button on the remote that you want to open the garage door with. On Genie products you will have to press the remote button three times. Repeat the process with each remote. You should be finished at this point.
If you have a wireless keypad, you will have to retrain this unit as well. The process for training the keypad is a little different. Most keypads will have a set of instructions on the inside lid of the keypad. Follow those instructions to train the key pad.
Alright, how many of you have tried to close your garage door with your garage door remote and it would not close? It can be kind of disturbing when you are about to leave your house and you can not get the garage door to close! I suppose that this problem is better than the alternative, your garage door not opening when you get ready to leave! Every day we open and close our garage doors several times a day, and we expect them to work every single time. This expectation is not realistic!
Garage doors and garage door openers each have several components that can fail. Especially when home owners do not perform regular routine maintenance! Not that regular maintenance is the answer for all your garage door and garage door opener problems, but there is a reason that they call it “preventative maintenance”!
Back to our original issue of the garage door not closing, there are a couple of things that can be done in under a minute to diagnose the problem. First, the obvious, make sure that there are no obstructions between the garage door opener safety sensors. I have been to countless homes where the garage door would not close, only to find a trash bag or a piece of lawn equipment blocking one of the safety sensors. Next, check to see if one of the safety sensors is obviously misaligned. As with the first issue that I described, many customers shake their heads when they see me walk into the garage and move one of the sensors and have to collect a service fee! If neither of these options work, try pulling the emergency release and lowering the garage door that way.
If neither of the first two suggestions are the solution we can move on to other options. It may be that one, or both of the safety senors have burned out. There is a small computer chip in each of these sensors, and they are subject to damage. Once you have ruled out all of the sensor issues, it is time to move on to other items. First, try performing your routine maintenance to both the garage door and the garage door opener. It could be that the garage door is not operating smoothly. Second, you may want to adjust the force on the garage door opener, but only enough to get the garage door to close. Over time, the motor in the garage door opener does wear out. If none of the previous suggestions will work, you may have another issue! It could be the gear inside the garage door opener.
Often times when installing a garage door, everything is not perfect! Especially in older homes, and those with basement garages. In the last seventeen years of installing garage doors, I have had my share of challenging work sites.
In older homes, it is not uncommon for the ceiling to be extremely short. Many times there is only a couple inches of clearance over the garage door. With the old style one piece garage doors, or kick out garage doors, this was not an issue as they only required about an inch of clearance. However, we do not use this style of garage door any longer. Today’s sectional overhead garage doors require twelve inches of clearance for a standard installation. There are options for smaller amounts of head room, though.
Basement garages often have duct work, plumbing, lights, etc. that can cause headroom issues even if the ceiling height is adequate. Today for instance, we ran into an issue where a previous owner of the home had converted the garage into living space. In doing so, he had installed a drop ceiling leaving us with only six inches of headroom to install both a garage door and a garage door opener. In this instance we had to use three inch low headroom track and extension garage door springs. Including the inch and a half that the opener requires, we had no extra clearance! It did work like a dream once we were finished, but these types of installations can be challenging, especially to those with less or no experience.
If you only have a slightly shorter than standard amount of headroom for your garage door, we can use ten inch radius track instead of the standard twelve inch radius. I mentioned the three inch low headroom track above, there is also a six inch version. These two types of track have a shorter vertical track, and then a double horizontal track. The top roller of the garage door follows in the upper horizontal track, and the other rollers follow the bottom horizontal track. This allows the top section of the garage door to turn much quicker than normal. However, with these types of track, the less clearance that you have, the harder that it is to make the door seal well without a garage door opener. There is now a zero inch radius track available. It too, utilizes a double horizontal track system like the other two, however you have install a garage door opener to a garage door with this track system or it will not seal the top of the garage door to the header.
As most of you reading this blog know, there are many brands of garage doors on the market today. At Aaron’s Garage Doors, we are proud to recommend Clopay brand garage doors. Clopay is the number one brand on the market for residential garage doors. However, this is not the main reason that we offer them as our first choice!
The fact is, that Clopay garage doors are manufactured and engineered better than most other brands that are available. They use techniques that other garage door manufacturers are not able to duplicate. Their packaging system makes their product easy to ship, both to the garage door installer, and on the trucks of the garage door installer. Not only are they well engineered and packaged, Clopay’s warranties are some of the strongest in the industry.
Clopay garage doors are the only brand on the market that have achieved and maintained the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, which says a lot about their products. Good Housekeeping put their garage doors through many tests, and found them to be the best on the market! So good in fact, that Good Housekeeping backs Clopay garage doors with their own two year warranty. They would not put their reputation and money behind an inferior product, with their own brand recognition.
Another important reason that we offer Clopay garage doors, is their wide variety of product lines. Whether your home needs are a wood panel, paintable model, or a custom made stainable carriage house garage door, Clopay has a facility dedicated to handle the construction of these models. Maybe you are looking for one of the more durable steel garage doors. Whether you prefer a traditional raised panel garage door that you see on most homes today, or a custom metal carriage house model with a vinyl overlay, there are hundreds of options available. From basic non-insulated models, to models with simple foam insulation, to those with highest R-value available using polyurethane insulation, Clopay has an option for your budget. Or, if different window options are what you are looking for, there are a wide variety of short and long panel designs. From snap in place patterns, to insulated or tempered glass, even leaded look acrylic windows.
Clopay garage doors simply have the most quality options for your home, which is why Aaron’s Garage Doors is proud to offer their products!
Does Aaron’s Garage Doors sell torsion springs? Yes, but we only sell them installed! This is not done because of some trade secret, or so that we can mark up the cost extraordinarily high because you can’t get them any where else. It is purely a liability issue, and a matter of the Golden Rule! You know, Do unto others as you would have done unto you!
That’s right, your personal safety is more important to me than making a few dollars off of selling you a torsion spring for your garage door! Yes, with the use of YouTube videos and other tutorials available on the internet, it is possible to replace your garage door torsion spring yourself. However, it has been not only my experience, but that of countless others including garage door suppliers, that it is best left to a professional garage door repair service.
First is the issue of acquiring the proper spring! No you cant just say it is about two inches in diameter and three feet long, it is much more precise than that. Garage door springs are calculated to balance your garage door for a specific weight, within five pounds of lift either way. This is all done through the use of different lengths, wire gauges, and diameter springs.
Second is the issue of safety. Actually, this is the main issue! I personally know several professional garage door repair technicians that have been seriously injured replacing garage door torsion springs. One slip and you can literally take your head off! I talked to a customer of mine not too long ago that was having me replace his spring specifically because his brother nearly did so! The winding rod slipped and it cut his neck wide open and he nearly bled to death. There is no telling how many jobs that I have seen blood stains on over the last seventeen years. People think that they can do this themselves, because they think “well how difficult could this be?”. No, it is not overly difficult! It is just dangerous.
Do you really want to run all over town trying to find a torsion spring for your garage door just to save the service call fee? Is it really worth your time and energy? Especially when you consider that you could be seriously injured? We don’t even like to have customers in the garage with us when we are winding torsion springs! This is not only for the safety of the customer, but for that of the technician! Just a little distraction can cause us a world of hurt!
Why choose Liftmaster garage door openers? This is one question that people should ask when selecting a new garage door opener. There are many brands on the market, and some are good and some are not! They all have similar function, so what makes one better than another? Well, there are actually quite a few reasons to choose Liftmaster over the competition.
Liftmaster by Chamberlain garage door openers are the professional series of the number one brand in the world. Chamberlain is marketed retail for do it your selfers under their own name and as the Sears Craftsman brand. So what’s wrong with the retail version, one might ask. Actually nothing, but they are not quite as well made is the professional version. What do I mean? Well the Chamberlain and Craftsman models have five piece, snap together, square tube rails. The Liftmaster models have a one piece “T” rail, that is much more ridged than the retail versions. The retail chain driven models have a half chain and half cable system, where the professional version is all chain and no cable. There are other less obvious differences, but they all help to explain why to choose the Liftmaster garage door openers over the retail versions.
Now lets talk about why to choose Liftmaster garage door openers over the competition. Specifically their number one competitor, Genie. Genie is probably better know than the Chamberlain family of garage door openers. Genie retail models also have a four piece rail system that is coupled together. The most well known Genie model is the screw drive system. While quite reliable, there are several downfalls to this design. First, they are quite loud as the screw is metal, and spins in a metal shaft. Next is the coupling that directly connects the rail to head tends to strip out, with the direct torque from the motor every time the garage door opens or closes. The worst problem that I can think of is when you are driving through a neighborhood and you can see the grease streak up and down the center of the outside of the garage doors. This is a dead give away that the home owners have Genie screw drive garage door openers!
So why not choose one of the many other brands on the market? Some of them actually are well designed and do not have any obvious flaws. However, the problem may actually lie in when you do have a problem with them. How do you get replacement parts and service for these lesser known brands? What if they just don’t make it, or no one sells them in your area any more? Other brands of garage door openers are just plain knock offs! Again, there may be nothing obviously wrong with these brands, but why buy a knock off? Is it really worth the $10-$20 savings? Not really!
|
