If your garage door needs some TLC, an expert garage door repair and installation company can come to your home and get everything working like new. But what can you do before calling a professional, to make our job easier and potentially save yourself the trouble and cost of calling an expert at all? 

1. Diagnose Your Door

Give your garage door assembly a quick look-over to see if you can determine the cause of the problem. In some cases, the problem may be obvious – if the spring snapped, for example, or if the door got hit by a car! In other cases, perhaps the door just stopped working. 

Trying to identify the problem yourself helps the experts know what they might want to bring to the job, and may even let them walk you through solving the problem over the phone. For some common problems, we can often resolve the customer’s issues without even needing to visit, getting you back on the road fast! 

The more you can describe or explain to the company you contact, the more they will be able to assist you. This includes things like identifying what type of spring your door uses, the make and model of the door and opener (if you know them) and what condition the door is currently in.

2.  Check for Common Problems

What kind of common problems are we talking about? One of the most common problems that we see is a door that won’t open or close – either it doesn’t operate at all, or it begins to open/close before stopping. Sometimes, the lights on the opener will blink to indicate that it has encountered a problem. 

If this happens, check to make sure that your photo-eye sensors aren’t obstructed. An obstructed photo-eye can prevent the door from moving. Then, check to make sure that power is running to the system. If the light won’t come on at all, it might be an electrical problem. 

3. Clear Some Room

Any garage door technicians that visit your home are going to need access to the garage door and garage door opener. If you want someone to take a look at your opener but have a car parked underneath it, we won’t be able to do our job! 

Before calling a garage door company, clear out a space for them to work inside the garage. For large-scale repairs and especially for installations, the technicians will generally require enough space to fit the door’s panels into the garage, then also enough space to swing it into place. A 2-car garage door is typically 16 or 18 feet long, and to do our job properly, we need space to fit that door into the garage and space to maneuver it onto the tracks. 

This is also true for vehicles – if you have a car parked in the garage or even in the driveway, it can make our work impossible or at least more difficult. The closer we can get our truck to the door, the simpler it is for us to work. 

If you follow these three simple steps, any visits from a technician can be an efficient and painless process. We want to get your garage door operational so you can get back on the road, and a little bit of work before our truck arrives can help everyone out!