Garage Door Safety Billings MT | Garage Doors Billings MT

A garage door and a garage door opener should be dependable. The door should open in most any weather (considering of course you’ve winterized certain components—see the previous two blog posts for ideas on how to do this) because we need the door to be as reliable to our time schedule as anything else in our lives. However, a garage door and garage door opener should also be dependably safe; children, pets, and our belongings should be safe around it. But how do you go about ensuring that your garage door or opener is dependably safe?

Safety Features

New garage doors and openers come with safety features built in. This is a result of legislation. These safety features include a device, which (to give a non-technical explanation) works as an all-seeing eye: there are two devices (the eyes), which are positioned at opposing sides of the garage door, and these eyes essentially watch each other, emitting a beam of light between the two, and, when the beam is broken, the door will not lower to a closed position (unless you override the safety features on the garage door opener). Another safety feature (although one not found on every new garage door) is a unique joint at the connection of separate garage door panels, which prevents fingers from becoming lodged in the garage door, by essentially pushing out anything from the joint as it closes.

Tips for staying safe

It’s a good idea to explain to children that, if improperly used, the garage door could hurt them. Children shouldn’t be allowed to play with the garage door or with the opener. Never walk beneath a garage door after you’ve closed it—if you must close the garage door from the inside—and you then try to outrun the closing garage door—it may be time to invest in a portable garage door opener, if you don’t already have one at home. Remember that garage door openers operate by electricity, and, if you have a problem with your garage door, that all power should be turned off at the fuse box before any repairs are made.

We hope these tips help you to stay safe around garage doors. And, if your current garage door, or garage door opener, model is without safety features, give Bailey Garage Doors a call today to discuss your options to keeping safe.

The garage door can be responsible for protecting some of the most valuable or valued things in our home: woodworking workshops and other tools, motorcycles and half rebuilt cars, or maybe even just a place to store our memories, the garage is an important area of the home. Because most garage doors are so big and seem so solid, this is an area of the home that people often overlook to protect. Burglars can enter the garage just like they can any other part of the home. A few simple precautions will prohibit most burglaries to the garage from happening.

Garage doors are opened daily, and, unlike the rest of our home, when the garage door is opened anyone with a view from the street is aware of the things we keep in the garage. People often forget to close the garage door when they leave, or maybe they have a forgetful teenager to blame, either way, keeping that door closed is paramount to prevent any crimes of opportunity from taking place. Your garage door technician can install a timer that will close your garage door for you after a predetermined amount of time. This will not forgo the safety mechanism put in place on the garage door like the garage door safety sensors, which prevent any accidental closure on people or objects (assuming that the safety sensors are working correctly). The timer has an override option if you wish for the door to remain open while you work, clean, etc.

When you are going on vacation, you should unplug your garage door opener. And, with the opener unplugged, you can put a padlock on the latch or run a metal bolt through a hole in the track to ensure that the door will not be opened from the outside.

Another thing that many people forget about is the garage door opener on the visor of their vehicle. That opener is hidden behind just a pane of glass. Remember to take the opener in the house with you, especially removing it from the vehicle if you are on vacation and the vehicle is going to be parked outside of the home.