A Homeowner’s Maintenance Hack– Maintain Your Garage Door Springs
A complex series of parts and components within your garage doors work together to keep your vehicles and home safe. The major components hard at work (i.e. garage door springs, cables, tracks, bearings, opener, etc.) operate exactly like pressure points and whittle away the longer they’re in constant use.
Here’s a little-known fact: Taking better care of your garage door torsion springs can help extend the lifespan of your entire installation.
NEW Garage Door Operation
When your system operates as it should, you usually don’t notice anything except for the odd noise or two.
Garage Door In-Motion
As time passes, pieces of hardware are put under increased pressure and wear away from repeated use.
Neglected Garage Door
If left unattended, you can see some critical parts, like your garage door torsion springs, snap and break prematurely.
Keep note: While we happily encourage you to maintain your garage door torsion springs at home, please leave all spring repair and replacements to the professionals here at Fawley Overhead Door! Keep reading for more homeowner maintenance hacks:
Where Are the Torsion Springs?
Knowing where the torsion springs are located on your garage door will help make your maintenance a much more streamlined experience. Torsion springs in particular are the long coiled springs situated horizontally at the top of the overhead door.
Know How to Identify Potential Problems
Garage door torsion springs are the most common type of spring we replace and recommend for new replacement in Portage, MI and Kalamazoo, MI. Understanding how your springs function can help you identify problems with your springs before they worsen. Take our proactive approach to your garage door torsion spring maintenance tasks so your garage door has a long lifespan.
When it comes to safely maintaining your springs, it helps to know the most common problems that can affect them and how the underlying cause can be fixed. With so many potential sources of issues, learning to identify them quickly can help make your maintenance process go as smoothly as possible. Here are some of the ways you can identify problems before they ruin your system:
Check to See If Your Springs Are Broken
If someone were to visibly inspect their springs, they should be looking to make sure one spring isn’t broken and the following are still intact:
- The torsion springs are securely fastened to the center bearing bracket
- The center bearing bracket holding the springs is securely fastened to the spring pad or wall
- If there is a spring pad, it’s securely fastened with no space between it and the wall
Exercise Extreme Caution While Maintaining Your Garage Door Torsion Springs!
While you can perform a thorough visual inspection of your springs, attempting to fix them on your own can prove dangerous. Garage door torsion springs are under a great deal of pressure and can exert an alarming amount of force if they’re handled improperly. Never hesitate to contact Fawley Overhead Door for emergency garage door spring repair as soon as you notice a problem!
You Start Hearing Strange Sounds
If you hear peculiar noises from your garage door torsion springs, such as popping sounds, it could be time to apply some garage door-specific lubricant. Over time, lubrication on these components wears away, and it can lead to grinding, popping, and more due to metal-on-metal contact.
Routinely reapply garage door lubricant to your springs so it can help penetrate and neutralize rust, clean corrosion, and prevent oxidation from the spring. If you notice the sounds persist after your maintenance, call us in Kalamazoo, MI to take a closer look.
Get the Right Size Spring
Sometimes, the problem with your torsion springs stems from the initial installation. For example, if a previous garage door installer in Portage, MI didn’t size your torsion spring, it could lead to your garage door breaking down prematurely. If you aren’t sure your setup has the correctly sized garage door torsion springs, please schedule our team for precise measuring.
Know What Kind of Lifespan Your Springs Have
Every garage door spring has a set lifespan that can give homeowners a reasonable timeline for when they need professional garage door spring replacement, with 10,000 cycles being the average. However, if you want a more durable option for your garage door, we offer our customers a higher spring cycle, coming in at 25,000 and 80,000 cycles.
Let Fawley Overhead Door Handle the Job
Fawley Overhead Door works with our customers to understand what’s wrong with their overhead doors and repair their torsion springs. Knowing how to properly maintain garage door torsion springs will help you ensure you own a longer-lasting overhead door. Not sure what is what? Schedule a free consultation with our garage door specialists in Kalamazoo, MI today!
