Garage Door maintenance is often left up to the professionals. And of course, we recommend having some of the more complicated work done by us, 😉 “Hung Right Doors” there are a few maintenance tasks that you can totally do yourself! Being able to do your own maintenance can save you so much headache. Making appointments for simple jobs can be more effort than it’s worth to you.
These five things you can do yourself will make it easier to streamline your life.
1. Testing Safety Limits
First of all, I should probably tell you what a safety limit is! A safety limit is when the garage door opener registers enough resistance that it realizes that it is closing on something, and reverses, opening the door back up. The reason these are important, is so that if the door is closing on something it shouldn’t like a vehicle, and keeps trying to close on it, significant damage could be done to the object being closed on, the door and the opener. This could result in thousands of dollars of damage!
To test to see if your safety limits are working, all you do
is stand at the door, and either have someone push the wall button
(while the door is open) or close the door with your remote. When the
door comes down far enough just put your hands under it and push up with
a medium amount of pressure. It doesn’t need to be super
hard, but hard enough to simulate something being in the way of the
door. If the door stops and reverses, then your opener is doing it’s job!
If not, then the safety limit may need to be adjusted!
2. Checking up on Photo Eyes
Photo
eyes are two black boxes with lenses, located 6 to 12 inches off the
ground on the front tracks at the opening of the garage door.
These
are there so that your door won’t close on anything laying in front of
the door. All openers installed in 1994 and after are required by
federal law to have working photo eyes. These eyes are great pieces of equipment, but are sensitive to dirt, light, and being incorrectly aligned. If the photo eye lenses are too dirty, have light shining directly into them, are not pointing at each other, or are blocked in anyway, they won’t let your door close! Check
them every few months or as needed to tighten the wing nuts holding
them in their brackets, and to wipe the lenses with a lint free cloth.
Next week we will touch on part two which is all about your remotes!