What Goes Up Must Come Down Sometime
Garage doors are funny things. They seem as light as a feather when they are working properly. You can practically open them with one finger. We aren’t talking about pushing the little button either, but about manually opening and closing a properly installed garage door. This illusion makes people think that a little garage door DIY maintenance is all you need when things get sticky. Pick up a can of spray lube, blast random parts of the system, and problem solved, right? If only it were that simple, sometimes you can DIY, sometimes you need to call a pro.
Not As Easy As It Looks
As anyone who has ever unloaded one from the back of a truck knows, garage doors are extremely heavy, not to mention bulky. What makes them seem so light is that they are very carefully counterbalanced with massive springs once everything is installed. If these springs ever break or come loose from their mountings, the effect is something similar to an 8-foot wide guillotine blade smashing down on the hood of your car. Once that runaway door has slammed down faster than you’d believe possible, you will probably try to lift it back off the hood of your car. At that time, you will find out for yourself just how heavy a garage door actually is and that DIY repairs are not for you, you should call a pro.
The point of all this is that garage doors are carefully balanced instruments of a complex mechanical civilization. If anything gets unbalanced, they can become outright dangerous even to professionals who understand all of the default principles of garage door safety. Yes, there are things that your average home garage door DIY guy can accomplish without too much risk. Changing the light bulb is not much of a problem. Replacing the batteries in the remote or putting in a new wall switch after the old one wears out are tasks that almost everyone can do for themselves. Replacing a broken roller can be done without a lot of peril.
The Risk Versus Reward Ratio in DIY or calling a Pro
For almost everything else involving a garage door, particularly a monster double-wide unit, it is really a good idea to let a professional handle the job. There are cases on record of people being decapitated while trying to adjust garage door springs. Others got crushed when that big, heavy door fails to latch onto a newly-installed DIY garage door opener and the door slammed down on top of them.
Of course, mechanically-inclined amateurs install and service garage doors all the time. It is not so much that it is hard to do, but that the consequences of failure can be disastrous if something goes wrong. An important garage door safety factor to consider is that you should never mess with a garage door unless you can find a full set of installation instructions for that particular model.
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