The Miami Valley sees a bit of everything: humid summers, cold winters with freeze-thaw cycles, and a spring severe-weather season that can bring strong straight-line winds and tornadoes. Garage doors take a beating from all three.
The area also has plenty of mid-century houses whose garages were designed for smaller cars and simpler hardware, and a steady flow of people moving in and out, including military families tied to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Each of those situations raises its own garage door questions.
Storm season and wind pressure
On most houses, no opening is wider than the garage door, and few are weaker. When high wind pushes a door inward, it can buckle or pop out of its tracks, and once wind gets inside the garage it can put pressure on the roof. Thin, uninsulated single-layer doors are the most vulnerable.
When it is time for a new door, ask about models with heavier steel, horizontal reinforcing struts and stronger track hardware. Those features make wide double doors stiffer in gusts. After a storm, check that the door still runs smoothly and that no sections are bowed before you put the opener back in service.
Mid-century ranches and their garages
Inner suburbs such as Kettering have many ranch houses from the postwar building boom. Their garages often have low headroom, a single-car or narrow two-car opening, and sometimes extension springs mounted above the horizontal track on each side.
Older extension springs should have a safety cable threaded through them so a broken spring cannot fly across the garage. If yours do not, have them added or consider converting to a torsion spring system. Low-headroom track kits make it possible to fit a modern door and opener where space above the opening is tight.
Moving in or out: check the door first
Home inspections frequently flag garage doors. The most common items are an opener that does not reverse when it meets resistance, missing or misaligned photo-eye sensors, and a door that is badly out of balance. Fixing those before listing a home avoids last-minute surprises.
If you are moving into a house, reprogram or replace the remotes and change the keypad code so previous owners and their contractors cannot open the garage. A technician can clear the opener's memory and set up new remotes in a single visit.
- Check that the door reverses when it closes on an object lying flat in its path.
- Confirm the photo-eyes stop and reverse the door when the beam is blocked.
- Clear old remote codes from the opener and reset the keypad.
Humidity, rust and the Great Miami River valley
Long, muggy Dayton summers mean condensation inside closed garages, and that moisture finds bare metal. Rust tends to show first on hinges, on the steel shafts of the rollers and on the corner brackets where the lift cables attach. A light lubricant on moving parts in spring and fall, and replacing badly rusted hardware early, keeps small problems from turning into a cable failure.
Last updated by the American Garage Door Team.