5 Signs You Need Immediate Garage Door Repair

Your garage door protects your home and property, but when it starts showing signs of trouble, fast action is crucial. Some key indicators that your garage door may need urgent repairs include loud noises from broken springs, sagging or cracked panels, poor sealing, and surface delamination. Understanding these warning signs can help you prevent more costly damage and ensure your garage door remains safe and functional year-round.

Your garage door is a significant investment, and you expect to get years of reliable service out of it. But, like all things, your garage door can break down. In some cases, a breakdown is a sudden event that renders your door unusable until it’s repaired. In others, the breakdown occurs gradually and may not become apparent until the damage is almost completely done.

This month, we’re listing out five situations in which you’ll need to contact your garage door experts to make a repair ASAP. Staying on top of needed repairs will help ensure that your door is able to keep on doing its job of keeping your garage safe, dry, and secure.

Your Door Is Hard to Open and Makes a Banging Noise

This failure mode is the most common issue that garage door companies encounter: a garage door that’s difficult (or impossible) to open and makes terrible banging noises when you try to open or close it. Those are the hallmarks of a broken torsion spring.

Your garage door’s springs are responsible for doing most of the work of opening and closing your garage door. These huge, powerful springs go under tension when your garage door is closed; when you open the door, the spring’s tension provides most of the lifting force. When your spring is broken, you or your garage door opener has to work much, much harder to get the door open.

If you notice the banging sounds and difficult operation that result from a broken spring, stop using your garage door immediately. Continued use of the opener on a door with a broken spring will damage it, possibly requiring a complete replacement.

There are no user-serviceable parts in your door’s spring mechanism, so you need to turn to your local garage door repair company to safely replace your door’s spring(s) and get you back in working order.

Your Door Has a Cracked Panel

Every month or so, you should give your garage door a quick visual inspection. This inspection isn’t an in-depth process; it’s just a brief scan to look for obvious points of concern. One of the most concerning things you can see is a crack running through one of your door’s panels.

Garage doors are very strong, but Mother Nature is a whole lot stronger. Especially here in Middle Georgia, your garage door suffers abuse from:

• Blistering heat and hard, direct sunlight
• Torrential, often violent rain
• Hail
• Near-tornado and tornado-force winds
• Snow and ice
• Bitter cold
• Accumulations of dust, dirt, and pollen

Even the most durable materials will eventually fail if left outside during enough Middle Georgia summers and winters. Paints fade, protective coatings are nicked and chipped away by hail and eroded by rain, plastic dry-rots, and just about any surface will grow mold and mildew in what seems like hours.

When cracks appear, they indicate that the elements have become too much for your garage door and that the base material has started to fail. A cracked panel can quickly become a failed panel, which can cause the entire door to collapse and destroy anything it hits on its way down.

If you see a crack in a garage door panel, your door is in immediate danger. Call your local garage door repair experts and get a quote for panel replacement as soon as possible before the crack turns into a garage disaster.

Your Door Is Sagging When It’s Open

Even without visible cracking, a door that’s starting to weaken can show some tell-tale signs. One of the easiest to spot is sagging. With your garage door open, look at the way the open door hangs between the door rails. It should be perfectly straight between the rails; if it sags in the middle, your door panels are weakening, and it’s time for repair or replacement.

When your garage door is standing open, the door panels are only supported by the rails on either side. Garage doors are heavy—ranging anywhere from 100 to 600 pounds (or more for specialty doors)—and over time, their structure will begin to weaken.

When that happens, the panels sag in the center when the door’s open. If the sagging gets bad enough, the entire door can seize in place as the door rollers are bent out of alignment with the track. In the worst-case scenario, the sagging panels can suffer a complete failure, and everything underneath the garage door can be crushed as the door pulls free of the tracks and crashes to the floor.

If your garage door doesn’t make a perfectly horizontal line when it’s open, it’s time to call the experts. They can replace the failing door panels or help you select a new garage door to ensure that your garage stays safe and secure.

Your Door Isn’t Sealing to the Opening

Garage doors are an exercise in alignment. When every component is situated correctly relative to the other components, you have a working and functional system for keeping water, heat, cold, dust, dirt, and intruders out of your garage.

When something gets out of alignment, though, the protections your garage door can offer are weakened. One of the most expensive ways this can manifest is when a door is misaligned with the sealing surfaces in the door opening.

When a door is out of alignment with its opening, it leaves space for dirt, water, snow, pollen, and wildlife (insects, spiders, rodents, snakes, etc.) to come into your garage. Items being stored are subjected to more temperature extremes and humidity and deteriorate considerably faster than they would in a properly sealed garage.

If you have an insulated garage door and a climate-controlled garage, poor sealing will mean skyrocketing energy bills and undue wear on your HVAC system.

If you stand inside your closed garage and can see daylight sneaking in around the edges of your door, you should call your local garage door repair experts. They’ll be able to assess the situation and get your door back in alignment and properly sealed.

Your Door Is Chipping, Peeling, or Delaminating

It’s easy, particularly in an older home, to dismiss peeling or chipping paint as an inevitable and low-concern issue that’s just part and parcel of dealing with old paint on old surfaces.

But when your garage door starts to crack and peel, it may mean that more than just the paint is being damaged. In many cases, what you’re seeing isn’t just “peeling paint” – you may be witnessing full-on delamination of your door’s materials.

Some garage door finishes are more complex than paint applied to metal. Fiberglass doors, vinyl-clad doors, and other composite materials are frequently composed of layers of different materials. Some of the materials are there to lend strength, others to protect against the elements, and still others to provide an attractive finish.

During manufacturing, these materials are bonded together using special processes, all of which are considered to be forms of lamination. While a laminated bond is intended to be permanent, there are hundreds of ways that minute damage can accumulate and cause the bonds between layers to fail – otherwise known as delamination.

If you see your door’s finish starting to peel, chip, or otherwise fail, it may indicate that you need more than just a coat of paint. You should always contact your trusted garage door repair company to come and determine whether you’re dealing with a surface-finish idea or if you’re seeing the early stages of your door’s eventual failure.

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