Part of being a homeowner is regularly checking over your home, seeing which aspects are in working order and which need a little maintenance. Doing this is the best way to ensure everything in your home stays in working order, but it isn’t easy to properly maintain some different aspects of the home. Continue reading to learn about five garage door maintenance tips every homeowner should know to ensure their home stays in the best condition possible.

Test the Balance

After a while, it’s easy for the garage doors to become unbalanced. Due to opening and closing so much, interior parts often run into issues and throw off the whole system. However, this imbalance may not be noticeable at first. Pull the release handle and manually open the door to test the balance. If it is correctly balanced, it should maintain its position while you open it. Sadly, if one side moves up or down more than the other, you should adjust the springs to ensure things get back to working smoothly.

Test Your Garage Door

Some people may interpret testing your garage door as simply opening and closing it to see if it works. While this is an effective way to see if the door is working as intended, there are some other tests you should conduct. About once a month, you should place something in the way of the closing door, like a block of wood, to see if the door will sense this object and begin going in reverse.

Lubricate Different Parts

As mentioned in the first point, if your door is unbalanced, it’s time to adjust the springs. What does adjusting the springs look like? You need to lubricate the springs often to ensure they function as intended. Sometimes, you may even need to lubricate some other parts, such as the following:
  • Hinges
  • Rollers
  • Door tracks
  • Opener’s chain
  • Drive screw
These parts can easily wear down over time, but refreshing them with some much-needed lubrication will get them working again!

Inspect Regularly

You’ll need to test the opener and see if everything is working as it should, but you must also look over the door and the hardware to spot irregularities. You could have cracks in the door, holes in the weatherstripping, or an internal problem like bent tracks or missing hardware. It’s important to inspect the opener so you can spot issues like these and address them before they spiral out of control.

Clean Often

In addition to inspecting everything regularly, you should also clean your door frequently. Doing this will help your garage door look good year long, and it will also help ensure that everything works. In addition to cleaning the door, clean some internal components to keep rust and other debris from interfering with the door’s ability to open. If you want to be a responsible homeowner, learn these important garage door maintenance tips to keep your garage door in order all year. However, while you may know about these tips, getting out there and treating your home is a different issue. It takes a lot of work, and you’ll need some help if something is broken. That’s where we at Steel City Garage Doors come in! We’re the best residential garage door repair service in Pittsburgh, and we’ll help bring your garage door back to life!