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Not all garage doors are suitable for you.

Depending on the type of installation, the use you will make of it, the intensity of use, etc. you can buy the best garage door by choosing it based on the most appropriate features and components

Not all doors have the same application. Let’s examine the most common ones and analyze what the best garage door should have for you,so that it meets your needs.

How to Choose a Residential Garage Door

In this article I take into consideration the most common installation: the residential one.

It is apparently the simplest and most obvious, but it is necessary to be very careful in choosing the overhead door for a single house for residential use.

First you need to ask yourself if your door will be needed

• Exclusively as entry into the garage, or
• As direct access to the house.

In the first case, the door must have accessories that make the most of entry into the garage.

If you enter and exit only with the car you have to consider how many times you will pass through that door, because depending on the accesses you will have to choose the door with targeted features.

How many times will you open your up-and-over door?

Let’s go into the specific:

• a door that opens once a day can have a 3 mm diameter rope and a plastic pulley..
• If you open it already 5/10 times a day we talk about 3600 annual openings.
  In this case you should consider buying a door with a thicker rope because it will be able to withstand a higher frequency of use.

The plastic pulley is fine if you use the door once a day but if you open the door from 5 to 10 times that pulley will be subject to rapid wear.

If you are interested in learning more, you can also read my article on what it is and what the pulley is used for overhead doors (and why it is important)..

Pedestrian Door: Benefits and Safety

If you also access the home from the garage, you also consider two aspects:

• the pedestrian door
• the security

The pedestrian door has many advantages ranging from practicality to savings:

• Continuing on foot, you will not need to open the entire door at every step, you will not need to always have the radio control behind and you will significantly reduce the work cycles of the door and the installed motor (if the door is automated).
• You will have savings on both reduced electricity consumption consumption because by doing less cycles there will be less consumption, both on the side of energy saving..
  Imagine, especially in winter, when you enter or exit a door 3 meters wide, if the room is a minimum warm in a very short time all the heat will come out out and the adjacent heated rooms will also suffer.

 

As for security, instead, I have to reopen a topic that I have already reiterated several times: not all overhead doors are safe..

Unfortunately the price battle and the race to the bottom have lowered the quality!

Safe Garage Door: What Does It Need to Have?

It is a question they often ask me: what must a secure lift have that others do not have?

The structure, the covering, the functioning, the lock: these are the main safety qualities that you must verify when buying a garage door for your home.

Let’s analyze one at a time.

Structure

Structure:consists of two main parts, one fixed and one mobile.

The fixed part is the “supporting” part, the one that supports all the movement of the overhead door.

Includes counterweights, uprights and upper crossbar. On this part the pulleys, the side arms and the sliding of the ropes are clamped.

When you go to buy an overhead door, check that the structure is sturdy,that it has no thin sheet metal components (even just to coat the counterweights) and that all the components installed on it have an anchor with a high degree of resistance.

Yes but how?

Ask if the door you want to buy needs to be walled up with vertical flaps to be installed. If this were the case then you will not have a fixed supporting structure!

If it is not walled then it will be tessellated; if the dowels are only in the upper part of the vertical uprights, then you are in front of a real supporting structure, on the contrary if the dowels are to be fixed over the whole height then you are facing a non-load bearing structure.

This already makes you reject the next steps.

If you are looking for a secure up-and-over door then it must have a supporting structure!

The Warpage

On the mobile structure what you need to check is the warpage. A structure that has a twist can be bent and therefore not safe.

The pivot

Another element that you have to observe is the pin: this is the element that connects the door that opens to the lifting rope.

Always check if this pin is welded to the frame or screwed: in the inexpensive overhead doors it is usually welded directly to the frame..

This eliminates some costly fixing elements and a lot of labor, which instead is used to install a threaded pin.

Ok but is this a real problem?

Maybe not functioning, but as you well know, accidents happen, maybe not by your will, but if someone “beats you” at the door and bends you the pin?

In this case they are pains! You will be forced to make a repair that will no longer bring the door to its initial functional state and will cost you a lot of money.

But what if this pin were screwed?

Just unscrew the old one to put the new one. Here is what little you spent more at the beginning to buy a security tilt, you saved it in this intervention and your door will always be perfect as the first day.

The Side Arms

Now, while you are analyzing the structure, you also check the side arms.

Check what materials are made.

Usually they are in iron but what size do they have?

Now I’m starting on the contrary and I tell you that an up-and-over door that has arms with a 5 cm wide and 8 mm thick section is a safety tilting!

The covering

The coating: can be made up of different types of materials. The best known is the galvanized sheet. Let’s examine this.

A safe coating must be thick! You don’t have to open it with a can opener!

Commercial sheet metal starts at 3/10 (a third of a millimeter!)

Ask for the thickness of the sheet! If it is under 8/10 (eight tenths) you are in front of a cheap door that will not give you security, if it has coverings ranging from 8/10 to 12/10 then here you will have security.

These thicknesses require more complex equipment to be cut and effracted.

Then there are coatings in marine plywood..

These allow you to have a more refined aesthetic but even here you pay attention to what you buy.

The commercial size usually starts from 14 mm. For an overhead door this thickness is too little.

A panel 1 meter wide with this thickness tends to deform. If you want a product that has no surprises in the future go to coatings that start from 20mm better than 25mm up to 30mm.

Marine plywood is a wooden panel composed of multiple layers glued together. Imagine going to the restaurant and having 10 slices of ham cut. Instead of putting one on top of the other as you cut them, put them one on top of the other but turn 90 degrees apart. The first will be placed horizontally, the second rotated 90 degrees, the third will put it back as the first and so on. Each layer is glued with the vein perpendicular to the underlying one.

This system avoids any breakage because the veins of the wood are compensated between one layer and another. The plywood panel, not cracking, will not cause damage to the paint because cracks will not form and consequently your door will not need maintenance.

Operation

This detail is always underestimated!

For many the tilting operation is the same for everyone, but it is not quite so. As I told you above,

A tilting overhead can be subjected to aggression and give in to attempted burglary. Try the twist when buying!

How to do?

Simple!

Open the door by not taking it from the center but from one side and you will immediately see how much it will warp or not.

If you really want a security swing door then hold the door on one side, open at 45 °, and try closing it on the other:

• If the door resists this solicitation you have bingo! This is a safe door, both for burglary and accident prevention, because it will never topple over!
• If the door has a twist, then don’t insist because it could fall on your feet!

It is for this reason that on all DMA security doors I offer the unique guarantee “If it is lost, it’s free!”.
 “Se si svergola, è gratis!“.

The lock

It is the mechanism that keeps the door closed if it is not motorized. A good lock protects our door well.

There are really a lot of locks on the market. There are single-delivery, double-delivery, 3-point and 4-point locks.

They are all basically valid if upstream there are the characteristics described above.

If you install a 4-point lock on a door that has a 3/10 sheet and and with an apron I can cut the sheet, the 4-point lock is useless!

However, there are some fundamental points to check and one of these is the pawl.

A classic pawl, , whether round or dead can be easily attacked from the outside with a cordless drill..

But if on this pawl we go to put a defender (protection) drill, the speech changes completely and your serenity will be complete.

Where is the lock installed?

Also check where the lock is installed.

It is usually placed at the top with a single rod that closes at the top. In this case, if there is no anti-torsion structure, that lock does not help much because the door can be folded to one side.

My advice is to install a lock 15 cm from the ground with an external drill protection and with two outlets that close on the sides. Possibly solid iron rods.

Preferably choose that type of lock which, if forced, breaks and remains closed. In that case you will have the certainty that a lock on the lock blocks your door permanently.

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Conclusion

In this article I analyzed the main points to avoid mistakes when choosing your garage door.

In the next ones I will show you what are the fundamental characteristics that an industrial and condominium door must have..

Now if you want more information, leave me your email here and you will become an expert too, with all the FREE tips I will give you.

Open your mind to our doors keep your desires safe with SecureMe!

Until next time!