Your garage door is the biggest and heaviest piece of equipment in your home. It does a lot of work, and it makes your life way more convenient. So, when it stops operating correctly, or altogether, you notice. But how do you know what’s an easy DIY door repair, what requires professional intervention, and what level of damage requires you to replace the garage door with a new one? We’ve picked four of the most common problems people have with their overhead garage doors so we can walk you through how to troubleshoot each situation.
How to Properly Inspect Your Garage Door and its Parts
To figure out what’s wrong with your garage door, you’ve got to know what to look for and where to look for it –
Inspect the garage door itself: Take a look at the garage door’s panels, hinges, brackets, and weather stripping. If garage door parts that move aren’t properly lubricated, they can cause a host of problems, including risks for corrosion, security risks, the possibility of the door coming off track, and risk of vermin and bug intrusion. Tighten any loose parts, lubricate moving door parts, and replace worn weather stripping.
Inspect the tracks and the rollers: Often, a jerking movement in the door’s operation is due to a bent track or worn-down rollers. Check the tracks for bends, breaks and obstructions, and clean them out. Examine the rollers and replace any that need it. If you have metal rollers on your garage door, replace them with nylon ones; they’re quieter and can’t corrode. Remember never to lubricate the tracks.
Inspect the door’s infrastructure: Has a track come off the wall? Is a ceiling bracket loose? These things can unbalance a door, which can make using it unsafe, and can cause cascading issues for other garage door parts like the panels and automatic opener.
Now that we’ve gotten familiar with how to examine your garage door, let’s get into how to diagnose an issue.
1. Garage Door is Noisy
There are a number of reasons your garage door is making an awful sound. Don’t worry, none of them are death knells:
Compromised torsion springs: Professional repair required
A garage door’s springs are under an incredible amount of pressure. If you see a break, deformation or corrosion in your door’s springs, stop using it immediately and call a professional garage door repair company to perform the repair.
Worn-out rollers: DIY garage door repair
Rollers are an easy in-and-out switch. Or, if they don’t need replaced, you can gently clean and then lubricate them. Fixing the friction issue will quiet a noisy door.
Dry/corroded hinges: DIY garage door repair
Lubricate and/or replace any hinges or brackets that need it. This is a safe DIY repair as long as you keep the door in the down position at all times, and ensure that any fastener you’re replacing won’t cause the door to come apart.
2. Garage Door is Crooked and/or Stuck
There are 3 main reasons a door comes out of balance, off its tracks, or gets stuck:
Bent/broken tracks: Sometimes safe to DIY, sometimes requires professional repairs
If there’s a minor bend in a track, you can safely repair this garage door issue yourself as long as you secure the door just above the bend before you use a tool to pry the track back into correct form. As well, if a track is starting to come loose from its wall or ceiling anchors, put the door in the down position and tighten the loose parts.
However, if there’s a whole break in the track, and especially if you happen to notice it when the door is open, stop using it and call a repair technician to your home. Also, if you notice it has caused the door to jump its tracks, it’s a better idea, more often than not, to have a professional rebalance the door.
Broken torsion spring: Professional repair ONLY
Messing with broken garage door springs is a huge “No.” If you aren’t professionally-trained, replacing a broken torsion or extension spring is extremely dangerous. Don’t continue to operate a door with a broken spring; you’ll hurt the garage door opener’s motor and might cause damage to other parts on the garage door via unbalanced wear and tear.
Dirty tracks/rollers: DIY garage door repair
The tracks, rollers, pulleys and cables determine how much work the garage door opener has to do, and when. If rollers are damaged or the tracks are grimy, increased friction can cause uneven movement and unbalance a door, or cause it to get stuck altogether. You can easily avoid this issue with regular DIY cleaning and maintenance.
Compromised panel section: Replace your garage door
You can have the damaged panel replaced if you caught the problem early on, whether it’s corrosion, deformation or breaks. But if the damage has caused issues with the tracks, the header, the springs and/or the framing, you’ll need to replace the garage door. If a panel is that far gone and it wasn’t from an accident, your garage door was likely on its last legs, anyway.
3. Garage Door Opener Keeps Running after the Door has Stopped Moving
The reasons your opener’s motor keeps running range from basically harmless to potentially catastrophic. It’s fine.
Door opener’s limits are wrong: DIY fix or professional repair
This one’s your choice. What’s happened here is that your garage door opener and your garage door aren’t communicating properly. The garage door opener is supposed to know when the door is completely open and when it’s completely shut. If you reset its limits (or have a technician do it for you) and the issue abates, it was as simple as that.
Disengaged trolley: DIY garage door repair
If the thing that guides the door isn’t connected to the opener, the door isn’t going to move. To reengage a trolley, all you have to do is pull the emergency release cord back toward the opener unit until you hear it snap back into place.
Stripped gears: Sometimes professional fix, sometimes requires replacing the garage door opener
If there’s a worn or stripped gear in your garage door opener, it won’t move the door correctly, or at all. If this is the issue, looking back, you probably noticed weird noises or jerky, uneven movements a few (or way more than a few) times before the garage door stopped working altogether.
Occasionally, you can replace a gear. But if failure to deal with the issue early on has caused damage to the motor or other garage door opener parts, you’ll need to have someone come in and replace the opener. Not a bad idea, though; newer automatic garage door openers are objectively better than older models.
4. Garage Door Opener Won’t Work
There are a host of reasons your garage door opener might not be working. Easy fixes you can do yourself are if:
- The opener has come unplugged.
- Something tripped the garage’s circuit.
- The opener’s remote battery is dead.
- The opener remote needs reprogrammed.
- The garage door’s eyes are blocked or dirty.
- The release cord was accidentally pulled.
- The lock setting has accidentally been activated.
However, there are a few other possible causes for your malfunctioning opener that aren’t safe to DIY, including:
- Broken springs
- Frayed cables
- Chewed-through wiring
- Door’s come off track
If your garage door opener is 10+ years old and it’s stopped working, it’s likely time to replace it. Automatic garage door openers are used so often and for such a long time that eventually they wear out, between the motor, moving parts and the circuit board. Ask your local garage door repair company about smart garage door opener systems, which will increase the security of your home, the safety of your garage, and will extend the life of your door with consistent, accurate operation of the door.
Moral of the story is, if you’re having problems with your garage door, and aside from regular maintenance and simple fixes, it’s still malfunctioning, the way to maximize chances you won’t need the door replaced is to call professional specialists to fix it first.