Rated 6 Critical Garage Door Safety Tips for Your Home and Family
Garage doors are such a familiar part of our homes that we often don’t think about just how unsafe they can be. As the only mechanically moving mechanism within most of our homes, the standard garage door can actually be very dangerous — especially to children and pets. If you want to keep your home and family safe, you should follow these critical garage door safety tips. They could even save a life.
1. Always keep your garage door openers away from your children.
Children are always tempted to play with things, even if they know that it’s unwise. You should always keep your spare garage doors far away from children. Simply raising and lowering the door could be dangerous, and children are often tempted to do “fun” things such as attempt to ride the garage door up and down. Most young children shouldn’t be able to reach high enough to open and close the garage door from inside of the house.
2. Make sure children know to stay away from garage doors when moving.
The best way to ensure the safety of your children is to educate them early on and frequently about the dangers of a moving garage door. Be as specific as you possibly can so that you’re children really understand why they shouldn’t play with the garage door when it’s moving. Don’t tell them that the garage door is dangerous, tell them it’s dangerous because it could fall on them or it could pinch their fingers. When children properly understand the dangers of something and what can happen to them, they’re more likely to follow directions.
3. Test out the emergency release system on your garage door regularly.
The emergency release system of your garage door is very important, but you may never know that it’s not working if you don’t test it out. Set aside some time to make sure that it’s operating as it should. You may want to attempt to manually open and close your garage door to make sure that the entire mechanism is working properly as well.
4. Inspect your garage door once a month for any issues.
Garage doors can experience wear and tear, and eventually they may begin to break down. You should open and close your garage door fully and inspect it, to make sure that it’s operating consistently. Look at your garage door for any new damage, such as dents or scrapes — that could indicate that someone hit the garage door at some point, which could potentially throw it out of alignment. At the same time you inspect for damage, you may also want to inspect for other issues such as broken insulation.
5. Test out the sensor of your garage door regularly.
Your garage door reverse sensor is what stops your garage door from potentially closing on people and animals. Test out your garage door’s reverse mechanism by putting a pillow underneath the garage door and closing it; the garage door should immediately back up once it hits it. If it doesn’t, you should immediately call a repair service — this is incredibly dangerous. Small children and animals can be hurt very badly by the full weight of a garage door.
6. Make sure the door to your house is locked.
The door between your garage door and your house should always be kept locked. Criminals tend to use garage doors as access points. A garage door is much easier to lift up for a criminal than a front door may be to break in. Further, a garage door can also be accidentally left open, which can expose your home to the world. Make it a habit to lock the interior garage door so that criminals that do gain access to your garage door can’t access the rest of your home.
Apart from the above, you should always take action to repair your garage door immediately when it’s broken. A broken garage door — even if it still operates — is much more dangerous. At Action Garage Door, we can send a technician down to determine how serious your garage door’s issue are and exactly what needs to be done to fix it. Contact us today to find out more.
