Since 1993, all garage door systems have been required to have a crucial safety system known as the photo-eye sensor. The photo-eye, however, is also one of the most common causes of garage door problems! Knowing how this safety sensor works can enable home or business owners to fix some problems with their garage door, without even needing to contact an expert. So if you want to know more about the sophisticated safety of the photo-eye, read on!
It is surprisingly easy to get shut out of your own home! Even if you don’t think that accidents like this could happen to you, there may be times when your garage door is closed and you want someone to be able to open it from the outside. If you have friends coming over or adult children visiting, the garage door can be an easy way for them to come inside your home, without you having to give them an actual key. The secret to solving all of these problems lies in a simple device – the garage door keypad.
Why should you care about your torsion spring? Well for starters, can you even identify your torsion spring? The helical torsion spring is the true workhorse of the garage door, and it is pivotally important in the operation of the door. Almost all garage doors, residential or commercial, are built to use a helical torsion spring in their lifting operation, but the spring is easy to ignore. The same properties that make a torsion spring desirable also make it hard to notice – they’re quiet, space-efficient, and reliably powerful! Plus, they’re all around you – once you start looking for them, you’ll find helical torsion springs everywhere!
The modern world is all about technology, and in today’s day and age, consumers want everything in their life to be smarter. Cutting-edge technology has improved our cars, our phones, even the credit cards in our pockets have chips inside them now! It should come as no surprise then that the garage door is not immune to these forces of modernity, and today’s doors have all sorts of tricks that old-timey carriage house doors couldn’t have imagined. Today, we’re going to talk about the 4 best innovative garage door technologies, and if you’re still using an older door, give you a chance to see what your missing out on!
Have you had a conversation with your children about the garage door? Garage doors are a typical part of life for adults, but children are often fascinated by them. Your residential garage door is loud, large, and moves without anyone getting near it – it isn’t so hard to understand why children find them interesting! This wouldn’t normally be a problem because garage doors are quite safe if they’re treated carefully, but there are cases of garage doors breaking or collapsing, or of their safety features failing. Either of these can be dangerous to inattentive children, and educating your kids about the garage door can literally save lives.
There are only a few names that are as synonymous with an industry as Microsoft is with personal use software. Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office are two of the most widely used pieces of software in the world, and for years Windows was the undisputed king of operating systems – Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, and other Office softwares are still the most widely-used solution in their respective fields, with consistent usage by school-aged children and business owners alike. But Microsoft, like many other great companies, comes from humble origins. Bill Gates, the single man most responsible for Microsoft’s success and the wealthiest person in the world, built Microsoft to capitalize upon the success of his early forays into software development. Today, Microsoft is a household name across the world, but at the beginning of this story, Microsoft’s founders were meeting in a California garage for the first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club.
Dyson is a symbol of innovation around the world, but they got their humble start in a garage, just like so many other important companies of today. James Dyson, the inventor behind the company’s rise to fame and the continuing sole owner of the company, started working on a new way to vacuum after realizing that his Hoover Junior was losing suction over time, as the bag filled with dust and the mesh became clogged. Over 5000 prototypes later, Dyson implemented centripetal cyclones similar to those used in sawmills and build the G-Force, a revolution of a vacuum cleaner that propelled Dyson into the very lucrative vacuum cleaner industry. Now, Dyson sells to over 70 countries, produces vacuum cleaners, hand dryers, fans, and heaters, but the company continues to push the entrepreneurial inventor mindset that it was founded on. All of this, from Dyson’s early prototyping efforts in the coach house attached to his home in Cotswolds, England.
Can you imagine life without a garage door opener? Your parents or grandparents lived without them for years, of course, but the modern convenience of pulling up your driveway and seeing the door already opening is a welcome sight. The concept of having to park your car in front of the door, get out into the heat or rain, and manually lift the door isn’t just annoying, it is also a huge safety risk. Your garage door opener is responsible for holding the door closed until your specially coded remote opens it. What you probably don’t know about your opener is that it might be costing you hundreds of dollars a year.
Amazon.com is the largest Internet-based retail company in the United States, and the 6th-most-visited website in the world, but it hasn’t gotten to that lofty position without some growing pains. Amazon in one of the newest companies we’ll be covering in Garage Greatness, since they made their first sale in 1995, a mere twenty years ago. In those twenty years, Jeff Bezos, the manically-driven mastermind behind Amazon’s record-shattering success, has moved his business from a garage-based bookseller to a household name and competitor in nearly every industry and country around the globe. At the beginning, however, it began in a garage.
Google is the most omnipresent and omnipotent power that people interact with on a daily basis, which has given some geeks the idea to argue that Googlism – that is, worship of Google as God – is the closest that humans will ever come to interacting with something omnipotent. The farcical religion is more joke than theology, but the believers of Googlism are right about Google’s power over every part of our lives. Google is the most-visited website in the world and handles over half of all internet searches, but Google Inc is also involved in Email, cloud storage, an office software suite, and a host of cutting-edge technologies like self-driving cars and augmented reality headsets. The company is a very big deal, and vying with Apple (another garage startup!) for the coveted position of most valuable brand.