What Actually Happens During a Garage Door Tune-Up

A garage door is the heaviest moving object in most houses, and on a family home it cycles maybe a thousand times a year. Almost every failure we get called out to announced itself first as a noise, a shudder, or a door that ran a little rough for a few weeks. Maintenance is just the business of catching those while they are still small.

What we go through

• Rollers, checked for cracks, flat spots and play in the stems
• Hinges and brackets, checked for wear and re-tightened where they have worked loose
• Tracks, checked for alignment and for anything that has got into them
• Cables and drums, checked for fraying and for even winding on both sides
• Springs, inspected for gaps, rust and fatigue
• The moving parts lubricated properly — the right places, and not the track itself
• Balance: the door disconnected and lifted by hand to see whether it holds position
• The safety reversal tested, so the door backs off when something is under it
• Travel limits and force settings on the opener, checked and adjusted if needed

The two that matter most

If you take nothing else from this: balance and safety reversal are the two that matter. A door that is out of balance makes the opener do work the springs are supposed to be doing, which is how a healthy opener gets worn out years early. And the safety reversal is the thing that stops a door closing on a person or a pet — it is worth testing even if you never have anyone out to look at anything else.

How often

Once a year is a reasonable rhythm for a normal household door. Sooner if the door is getting a lot of use, if you have started hearing a new noise, or if it has begun running unevenly. A door on a business that opens and closes all day is a different animal and wants looking at more often than that.

None of this is exciting work. It is, though, the cheapest hour anybody spends on a garage door, because the alternative is finding out about the problem at the point where the door has already stopped.