Here’s How to Avoid Garage Door Repairs

Let’s see. It is huge, heavy and it moves completely out of the way, every day, twice. But when’s the last time you had garage door repairs? Chances are you either have never needed to repair your garage door, or you can’t remember the last time you did.

But that doesn’t mean that you won’t ever need a door repair. Very often, the door should be fixed, but we go on living with it as it is. Maybe it doesn’t quite close all the way, or it wakes up the neighbors every time you use it.

In any case, there are ways for you to keep your garage door working the way you expect it to work for a very long time.

1. Keep Stuff Away from the Door

One of the best ways to increase your chances of having to get your garage door fixed is to store things inside your garage right next to the door.

It’s a spot that can seem clear and handy, but the cables used to support the door and keep it level need the space to operate. When you store something in the space near the cables, they can end up being stretched, or even disconnect or snap. Now you’ve done it.

2. Look & Listen

One of the best ways to ward off repairs is to simply look at and listen to the door as it opens and closes. Any unusual noises or during operation can mean a repair is in the near future. Every now and then, disconnect your garage door opener and try to open the door manually (please don’t strain yourself). If you can’t manage to move the door, or it’s overly difficult, you should find out why.

3. Put ‘Garage Door Maintenance’ on Your To-Do List

Instead of checking your garage for signs of repair just one time after reading this post, put ‘inspect the garage door’ on your to-do list at least once a year.

Don’t Do DIY Repairs

Your garage door is very heavy, it is under tension to make it easy to operate and it can severely harm you. Leave your garage door repairs to professionals. Call us at 905-665-8668 for safe and reliable garage door repairs.

While our memories can fade, it seems like throughout the 20th century and so far in the 21st, just about the only thing that changed in garages was the addition of garage door openers.

Sure, garage doors changed in that they are now built with more durable materials and they’re insulated. We also started using the garage to store anything except our cars. But, generally speaking, you’d probably not find too much really different about your grandfather’s garage compared to yours.

That’s all about to change if it hasn’t started already.

Here are just a few ways your garage will be different sooner than later.

1. It Will Be Your Fueling Station

Maybe you’re committed to gas engines and won’t give them up until the last one sputters out. In any case, the move towards alternative-fuel vehicles, particularly electric cars, is underway and nothing appears to be stopping it. Instead of hitting the gas pumps on the corner, you’ll be ‘filling up’ in the garage.

2. Part of Your Connected Home

This is the ‘future’ that has the most chance of being in your presence. For at least five years now, LiftMaster has offered its MyQ™ technology to monitor and operate many of its garage door openers remotely on your smartphone. As everything else in your home comes online, from your refrigerator to your lights, your garage door is right there with them.

3. More Living Space

If the idea of an electric car still seems distant to you, the idea of no personal cars at all might seem unimaginable. Never-the-less, autonomous cars open up the possibility that, instead of owning your own vehicles, you’ll simply call for a car when needed and one will show up at the front door in a few minutes. Without the need to park your car there, the garage can become a huge addition to the living space of your home.

If the future is quite here yet, you can call Whitby Garage Door at 905-665-8668 if you need a new garage door, or maintenance and repairs to the old one, until it gets there.

If you’re in the market for a new garage door, you’ll probably be visiting more than a few garage door websites.

While websites are basically online advertisements for a business, you can still tell a lot about a company from them. One quick way to get a bit of real background is to look for ‘credibility symbols’. These are logos of industry associations or awards from review sites like Homestars. If they are authentic, they can and some measure of credibility to a company you haven’t dealt with before, or even heard of. You can simply visit the sites or call the associations that the logos represent to verify if the company is indeed associated with them or if they were the award recipients they claim to be.

A company blog is another way to find out a lot about a company. But, again, you need to have a way to verify what you see. Just the existence of a blog is not enough to confirm that this is a good garage door company to work with.

Take a look at what they blog about. If they have posts with titles like “How to Spot the Best Garage Door Companies”, the information might be useful. But you can bet that the company that wrote the post fits all the criteria for being a great garage door company according to what’s written in the post.

How to Use the Website’s Photo Gallery to Spot a Good Garage Door Company

Not every garage door installer’s website will have a photo gallery. But if it does make sure you visit the page and look for the following:

1. Professional Photography

If every photo in the gallery looks like it could be in an architectural magazine, with perfect lighting and what looks like a custom-designed home, beware. You’re probably going to choose a local garage door installer, so the houses and doors should look familiar. And don’t be afraid to ask the company where the homes are in the photograph.

2. Variety of Doors

So you establish that the photos are of actual installations the company has done. But if they all look annoyingly the same, with maybe a few different colours on similar designs, then that’s another reason to be aware. It means the company may have a deal with a single supplier, even for a single model of a door, and your options will be limited.

3. Look for How the Door Affects the Curb Appeal of the Home

Every new garage door will look good. But does it fit with and even enhance the overall curb appeal of the home. If you can’t tell from the photos, ask the garage door company for a list of their installations that are near your home and take a look yourself. A good garage door installer will be more likely to look for and recommend a certain style or type of door that will not only look great on your home but fit your needs too.

You could just skip the whole website and gallery thing and take our word for it. We are the best garage door installation company in Whitby! Contact us online or call 905-665-8668 today.

What’s all this about ‘protect your car in the garage’? If you park your car in the garage, it’s protected, right?

Yes and no. Yes, your car is protected from the elements and the neighborhood kids when it’s in the garage. But even in the garage, your car can face other hazards that can cause costly damage.

How to Protect Your Car in the Garage

By knowing how your car can be damaged in the garage you’ll know how to protect it by preventing that damage.

1. Keep the Garage Door Closed

The primary protection you want to give your car has nothing to do with damage. According to one insurance company, your car is more likely to be stolen if you leave your garage door open. Leaving it open even a few inches can make it easier for thieves to take your car.

2. Know When to Stop

If you are like most homeowners, you use your garage for much more than parking your car. That means you might not have as much space to work with. When driving in, knowing when to stop before you hit something can be tricky.

A simple solution is to hang a tennis ball from the garage ceiling. Park the car in a spot that is as far away from anything inside the garage as you can get. Hang a tennis ball from a spot on the ceiling that lets it just touch the windshield. Next time you come home, drive the car into the garage until the windshield touches the ball. No more guessing how far you have until you hit something.

If you like high-tech solutions, garage door opener manufacturer Liftmaster offers a laser-guided parking assist accessory. 

3. Protect Your Doors

Another damaging symptom of too little space in the garage comes from not having enough room to fully open the car doors. But there is a way to stop worrying about damaging the doors every time you get into or out of the car. Attach swimming pool noodles to the garage wall, or anything that your the door might strike.

Your car is a big investment. These few things will help protect it. If you’re looking for a more secure garage door or garage door opener, contact us here at Whitby Garage Doors.  

It’s been a little over a year since we first told you about some of the garage door scams being perpetrated by shady installers.

Unfortunately, the garage door installation business is a good one for unscrupulous operators to take advantage of. It is unregulated. It is easy to find suppliers. And it’s something homeowners don’t need very often.

Perhaps best of all for the ‘fly-by-night’ operators, even the least expensive garage door available, hastily installed, will work for at least a few years. That’s more than enough time for them to change business names so they don’t have to be responsible for their shoddy work.

It all adds up to mean that, among all the other decisions you must make when buying a new garage door, you have to be on the lookout for garage door scams.

3 More Garage Door Scams to Watch For

In addition to the scams we told you about before, here are three more going on right here in Toronto and the GTA.

1. Low-Priced Service Calls

This is one to look out for if you need garage door repair or maintenance. That’s often when you need emergency work and most vulnerable to a scam. We found one recently for a “100% Guaranteed” $19.00 24-Hour garage door repair service. The Google listing gives you the impression that your garage door service will only cost $19. But when the service person gets there, he will ask for more money before starting any work.

2. Discount Coupons

Many garage door companies will offer online coupons for reduced prices on doors. But they don’t tell you that the coupon doesn’t cover installation. So you go to them to get a good price on the door, and end up paying it all back, and maybe more, in the price of the installation. Always ask every garage door company you call to itemize everything that’s included in any quotes they give you.

3. Masquerading as Another Company

Unfortunately, we’ve been victims of these sorts of scams ourselves. We are well known in Whitby as a reliable garage door installer. Other companies will make it look like they are Whitby Garage Doors to make you think they are us. Take a close look at web addresses, paperwork, business cards, etc., and make sure they are all consistent with the company you think you’re dealing with.

Or you can skip all the checking and contact us here at Whitby Garage Doors. The one and only!

How well insulated is your home? Even if you know how important good insulation is for reducing your heating and air conditioning costs, and improving the overall comfort of your home, your house probably isn’t as well insulated as you think.

If your garage door isn’t insulated, there can be a costly gap in your overall home insulation and home comfort. While the attics and walls of most homes, especially newer ones, are insulated, few if any have insulated garage walls and ceilings.

Even of they do, they still have a problem is the garage door isn’t insulated.

Why You Need an Insulated Garage Door for Optimal Home Comfort

One of the main reasons why not having an insulated garage or garage door can affect your home comfort is the way in which most homeowners think about their garage. While there is a door between the garage and the house, most homeowners don’t think of it as a door to the ‘outside’. Why would they? It leads to the garage.

Just like you don’t insulate your interior walls and floors, you don’t often think about insulating your garage. It feels like its ‘inside’ too.

But cold and heat can get into your garage more easily than you think. Uninsulated garage walls and doors let in more outside temperatures than you think. A garage door left open is like exposing the rooms that adjoin the garage to outside heat and cold without any insulation at all.

That can affect the comfort of your entire home as your heating and air conditioning go into overdrive to battle the invasion of heat and cold.

Insulated garage doors are the final piece of your home installation puzzle. Just like a puzzle isn’t done until the last piece is in place, neither is your home comfort.

To learn more about insulated garage doors, call us at 905-665-8668.

What is cracked, chipped, has grease stains and paint splatters.

Give up?

Your garage floor.

And, unfortunately, that’s no joke. If there was an award for the one part of your house that is most neglected, your garage floor would at least be on the running every year. Heck, it would be lucky to get swept once a year.

But that doesn’t mean you’re a bad homeowner. Garage floors are bare concrete. Concrete is notoriously difficult to clean. Whether in the basement or garage, we wouldn’t think twice about leaving a paint spill on a concrete floor instead of wiping it up. But you can’t say that about any other floor in the house.

Winter also has its own surprises for your garage floor. Especially the salt and dirt that get trapped in the snow and ice that clings to the wheel wells on your car. Once you drive into your garage, it’s only a matter of time until the brownish concoction melts enough to hit the floor. Then it leaves white salt lines on your floor as the moisture evaporates.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Options for Garage Floors that Stand Up to Just About Anything

By showing your garage floor a little love and attention, it’ll reward you with great looks and easy cleaning of anything you can throw at it. You’ll have to properly prepare the floor before using any of the following options.

1. A Coat of Paint

Applying a coat of concrete paint to the floor is probably the fastest and easiest way to improve your garage floor. It bonds with the concrete. A few solid coats will help the floor last much longer.

2. Apply an Epoxy

Epoxy, polyurea and polycuramine coatings offer the toughest floor protection with the ease of paint-on application. These coatings can even be chemical and acid resistant. And they are available in a wide variety of colours and finishes.

3. Floor Tiles

Ceramic or porcelain tiles are not only the most durable flooring for your garage, but the best looking too. Be ready to apply a levelling layer of concrete before tiling the floor.

Not only will you keep a coated garage floor cleaner, but you’ll also begin to see options for your garage beyond just using it as a place for your car.

How many Christmas gifts will you get this year that you will use every day? In a related question, would anyone ever give you a new garage door opener as a gift? Add it all up and, if you want a gift that you’ll appreciate every time you drive out of or into your garage, get yourself a new garage door opener.

But, wait, your old opener is working just fine. It’s been there since you moved in. Why would you waste a perfectly good gift opportunity (especially since it’s for yourself!) on a new garage opener?

It’s a good question. If there’s one ‘problem’ with most good quality door openers, it is that they seem to last forever.

5 Reasons to Get a New Garage Door Opener Even if the Old One Still Works

Here’s why you should think about gifting yourself a new garage door opener this year.

1. Safety – There are a remarkable number of 25- and 30-year-old openers still faithfully lifting and lowering garage doors. That’s great until you realize that, while they are working well, they are missing safety systems, like photo-eyes, which were not common on garage door openers until the mid-1990s.
2. Your Current Door Opener Won’t Last Forever – Maybe it’s already broken down and been repaired. In any case, openers don’t last forever. And you can bet they’ll finally call it quits at the worst possible time. The clock is ticking…..
3. Peace & Quiet – If you can tell when someone comes home, even when you’re in the basement, your garage door opener is too noisy. You might not realize the ruckus your opener causes until you hear (or not) the quiet operation of a new one. 
4. Battery Backups – If you’re still opening and closing the garage door manually every time the power goes out, get a new opener. Battery backups can give you as many as 10 open/close cycles when the power’s out. 
5. Get Connected – Just like about everything else in your house, garage door openers have joined the list of appliance you can control from your smartphone. Except, compared to finding out that your clothes are now dry, it’s actually quite useful to learn that your door has just been opened by someone and you’re not home.

If you’d like to learn more about why you should get a new garage door opener for yourself this year, contact Whitby Garage Doors today.