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By the end of this article, you will be able to carry out routine maintenance on your overhead door

If you are reading this article, it’s because you are at a crossroads:

1. You have a garage door that isn’t working well, and you want to know how to solve the problems that arise every day when you open it. You are undecided about which door to put in your garage and want to dispel all doubts about which one is best to minimize maintenance

Let’s start from the opposite and analyze the types of doors that are most common.

You could install a sectional or a traditional overhead door

What are you getting into by choosing one of these two types of garage doors?

Garage Doors: What Maintenance Do They Need?

I have talked about this several times in other articles, but I’ll repeat it if you haven’t read the information I often provide for free on my blog.

If you have a sectional door, you need to check several components:

Springs

You must continuously monitor the tension of this mechanism.

Many people approach the world of SecureMe, the number one security overhead door in Italy, and when I tell them that SecureMe doesn’t need maintenance, they are surprised. Others, however, tell me:

“Even the sectional doesn’t need maintenance, and the spring lasts for over 15,000 cycles.”

They haven’t told you a false thing; the spring can last all those cycles, but have they ever told you how many maintenance interventions you need to do before it reaches 15,000 cycles?

I bet not!

Do a simple test to immediately clarify your ideas: take a coiled spring in your hands and apply a series of twists to expand and tighten the coils.

After 100 times, you will see that is no longer the same

This is exactly what happens with a spring installed on a sectional door, nothing more, nothing less. By constantly charging and discharging, it loses its tension.

That’s why you need to intervene to continuously adjust the tension, otherwise, you risk burning out the motor.

Cables

Being very thin, the cables of sectional doors have a limited lifespan.

One thing you absolutely must keep an eye on is that they never come out of their housing.

At the point where the carriage is fixed to the first bottom panel, there is a housing where the cable must remain fixed, but in many cases, I have seen it come out.

What happens if the cable of a sectional door comes out of its housing, and how can you restore it?

When the cable comes out of the housing, it no longer works in line with all the components, and friction occurs with other components, causing the cable to break.

If this happens to you, you can try to raise the entire door and see if you can put the cable back into place by hand.

If the attempt is unsuccessful, then you must release the springs and put the cable back into place.

The work becomes very complex, and if you are not in the field, I advise you to let it go and pay someone who does this for a living.

Guides

These are the parts where the carriages slide.

Always keep them clean and check that no external material builds up on them.

I have often found, especially on the upper horizontal guides, some pieces of debris left there since the renovation works of the house ended while performing maintenance on sectional doors.

Nothing more harmful

The carriage, by passing over it, besides being noisy, can break and cause serious damage to the door and the surrounding items.

Carriages and Pins

This is another very delicate point on these doors.

The carriages are screwed directly onto the panel.

When you bought your sectional door, maybe they forgot to tell you that the sheet metal of the panels is very thin, and as you can imagine, a screw screwed onto such a thin sheet metal doesn’t have a long life.

That’s why you need to constantly check that the side roller carriers are always securely screwed to the panel

If one of these components comes off, it can cause you a lot of damage.

If instead of a sectional door, you have an overhead door, all you have to do is send me an email at info@dmporte.com with photos of your door and a contact number.

You will immediately receive a call from one of our professionals who will give you guidelines to always keep with you for when you need to perform maintenance on your overhead door.

In the meantime, click here; you might find something very interesting.