Your garage door is easily the biggest appliance in your home. It’s huge, weighs hundreds of pounds, moves, and hangs over your head on the ceiling. Can you imagine if it fell? Or if it closed while your kid was doing chalk drawings on the concrete below? These and dozens more reasons are why you should make sure your garage door and its opener have these 4 all-important safety features:
Sensor Eyes
These are sensors on the sides of your garage door that communicate with each other via… basically a laser – heist style. If the signal running between them is interrupted, it automatically stops the garage door from lowering. That means you never have to worry about the garage door closing on anyone or anything.
But remember to keep the sensors clean, or you’ll have a heck of a time trying to figure out why your garage door suddenly started refusing to close.
Automatic Reversal
Your garage door opener should have an automatic reversal feature that works in tandem with the sensor eyes, so that when something is detected in the way of the door, it reverses and sits back safely in its open setting.
Test this feature every so often to make sure it’s working properly.
Battery Backup
This one’s mandated now, so it should be a given. Your garage door opener should have a battery backup. This way, if the power goes out, you’re not stuck with a heavy or immobilized garage door. This is convenient in normal outages, and potentially life-saving in outages related to wildfire encroachment.
Remember to test your battery backup every so often. It will need replaced every 1-2 years.
Regular Maintenance
This isn’t so much a safety feature as a safety measure, but making sure your garage door gets its regular inspections and tune-ups is key to safe, smooth operations. It’s best to have a pro do annual maintenance and repairs, but you should do an inspection yourself seasonally. Catching problems early is important for keeping repair costs down and ensuring your garage door isn’t a risk to your home and family.
Speaking of keeping your family safe, there are also other smart tech and home security features you can add to your garage and your garage door opener – check out myQ Smart Home by LiftMaster.