Winter Garage Door Troubleshoot – Solve Cold Weather Problems Before They Happen
For most consumers, the rainy season is probably the worst time they can imagine for a garage door troubleshoot. After battling through the ice, snow, rain or hail, it’s natural for people to want nothing more than the warmth and comfort of their own homes to be accessible with the least amount of hassle. Indeed, a great many consumers state that cold weather was an important factor in their ultimate decision to purchase an electric garage door opener. When it’s working properly, an automatic garage door opener allows you speedy access to your home with you having to clamber out of your vehicle and expose yourself to the elements.
And so, it’s something of a nightmare when your garage door opener experiences problems on such a day. If this problem has been particularly persistent over the past few years of your life, you may have wondered why the need for garage door troubleshooting always seems to come up in the winter season.
Perhaps the most common problem that calls for a garage door troubleshoot in the winter cold is the sticking or stopping of the door midway through its operation. A similar, related problem with garage door troubleshooting comes with the door being extremely slow to open or close. Frequently, the garage door doesn’t even respond to the remote control until you’ve sat in your driveway for several minutes pressing the button, a time-consuming waste of battery life that doesn’t solve the underlying problem.
The first thing you should try in your garage door troubleshooting is to check the force setting of the garage door. This is recommended maintenance for all modern garage doors, and should be done every season, particularly if your home’s façade is built out of wood. The rationale behind this is that the density and water saturation of wood changes seasonally, and so the cold weather way affect the working of your garage door by increasing the weight of the door, and hence the ultimate strain on the motor. The additional work required of the door can at times cause it to labor much like a car stuck in first gear. By upping the ante of the force settings, which may have been left at the low level called for in warmer seasons, you can often totally bypass this issue.
Another, related problem you’ll definitely want to address occurs when your electric garage door lowers, as if closing, but then reverses its motions, leaving your garage door open and vulnerable to intruders (not to mention bad weather). Again, the problem almost certainly lies with the unadjusted force settings of your garage door opener.
Adjusting the force settings of your garage door is relatively simple and shouldn’t take more than a few minutes. First, check your garage door troubleshoot instruction booklet to see where the force screws on the garage door opener are. There should be two of them, but the location depends heavily on the brand of your garage door opener. One of the screws should be labeled ‘up’, the other (you guessed it) ‘down’. Using a screwdriver, adjust the appropriate screw and check the garage door’s function, repeating this process until you get the appropriate force and speed you desire. If you just remember to check and adjust these garage door troubleshooting settings at the turn of every season, you should have far fewer issues with your garage door opener.
