Why Shouldn’t I DIY Garage Door Repairs?
Uh-oh. Your garage door is broken. It’s time to break out the wrenches and screwdrivers and get to work, right?
Not so fast. Even the handiest of homeowners should definitely think twice before they start tinkering with their garage door. Sure, it may seem like a relatively simple mechanism, but hidden inside the workings of your garage door are a multitude of opportunities for the untrained to experience significant injuries.
From the sheer weight of your assembled garage door to the unbelievable amount of energy stored in a garage door’s torsion springs, there are dozens of reasons why you shouldn’t ever attempt DIY garage door repairs. Only the trained professionals at your local garage door service company have the tools and training required to repair a broken garage door safely.
Here are some more details on just a few of the reasons why home and business owners should leave their garage door repairs to the experts.
DIY Garage Door Repairs Are Unsafe
Garage doors, when they’re installed and used correctly, are incredibly safe. Technologies such as door-collision detection, safety sensors, and others have virtually eliminated the dangers that a garage door poses for most users.
But once you step outside the realm of regular operation and into the realm of repairs, your garage door becomes a hazardous piece of equipment.
Garage Doors Are Heavy
It’s easy to forget how heavy a garage door actually is. After all, with garage door openers installed on most residential and many commercial garage doors, few people ever lift their doors by hand. And, even those who lift their doors by hand only lift a tiny fraction of the total weight – most of the lifting is accomplished by the door’s spring or springs.
If a garage door repair requires detaching the door from the spring-and-cable mechanism, the door itself is simply running free on its track, with no spring to slow its fall if it starts to drop or assist in lifting it once it’s down. With the average door weighing in at between 100 and 300 pounds and some specialty doors running even heavier, someone who gets caught underneath a falling door will have only a fraction of a second to move before being crushed.
Garage Door Springs Are Powerful
In our previous two articles, we’ve mentioned the inherent danger posed by the torsion spring(s) that help lift a garage door’s immense weight. These heavy springs carry hundreds of pounds of tension when the door is closed.
If that tension is removed suddenly – by a spring breaking or by someone removing the wrong screw at the wrong time – all that force gets dissipated instantly. How is it dissipated? With nothing holding the spring in place, 100% of the energy escapes through the spring itself, causing the heavy steel coil to move in a random direction at an incredibly high rate of speed.
Homeowners, business owners, and even trained garage door professionals have been killed, maimed, or otherwise severely injured by being struck by garage door springs.
Garage Door Cables Are Deadly
Here’s a trivia question for you: what common field-day sporting event is the cause of a huge number of sports-related amputations? Would you believe it’s the humble tug-of-war? It’s true. But what does that have to do with garage doors?
The force from your garage door’s torsion springs is transferred to the door itself through a system of cables. If a cable breaks or is otherwise released from the door without the springs being relaxed, all the hundreds of pounds of force in the spring will be immediately unleashed.
If you’ve ever seen a rope or cable snap while it was under tension, you’ve seen how quickly and unpredictably the severed ends can travel. That’s how tug-of-war is a helpful illustration – every year, people suffer amputations and severe core injuries because a tug-of-war rope broke and whiplashed back into the participants.
And if a large, heavy rope under tension from a few humans tugging can cause that kind of damage, you can imagine what the much smaller, much lighter-weight garage door cable can do when several hundred pounds of tension are suddenly converted into motion.
Electricity + Ladders = Danger
“Oh, that’s okay,” we hear you say. “The problem isn’t with the door; it’s with the opener. Let me get out my multimeter and some electrical tape.”
Hold your horses. Your garage door opener is usually about 7-8 feet off the ground, which means you’ll be working off of a ladder. And every garage door opener in the US operates on at least 120 volts of electricity. Taking a shock at 120 volts is painful and dangerous enough, and something few people would ever choose to experience. But adding a ladder to the mix is asking for disaster.
When you accidentally come into contact with live current, your reflexes immediately start screaming for your muscles to move you away from the electrical source, which is a good thing – unless that flinch reflex causes you to lose your balance and fall off the ladder.
Why Try to DIY Garage Door Repairs When We’re a Phone Call Away?
When your garage door is out of commission, Overhead Door Company of Macon-Warner Robins is here to help. Our team of experts can perform repairs on any manufacturer’s garage doors and get things back on track. When you call us for garage door repair, we’ll be there within 48 hours to do the work and give you peace of mind about your door!
Call Overhead Door Company of Macon-Warner Robins at 478-474-4347 to schedule repairs!
Areas We Serve
No matter where you live in Middle Georgia, Overhead Door Company of Macon-Warner Robins is ready to help provide you with the garage door solutions you need!
- Macon
- Warner Robins
- Perry
- Bonaire
- Kathleen
- Forsyth
- Barnesville
- Milledgeville
- Jeffersonville
- Fort Valley
- Byron
- Unadilla
- Hawkinsville
- Montezuma
- Cochran
- Butler
- Reynolds
- Thomaston
- Roberta