Twenty Years of Vibration on a Romeoville Garage Door

When a door starts feeling heavy, the common response is to wind the opener's force adjustment up until it copes. It works, and it buries the actual fault. A door with the force at maximum will also fail its contact-reversal test, because the opener has been instructed to push through resistance rather than back off from it.

So the opener comes off first and the door gets lifted by hand. A balanced door moves with roughly the effort of a full kitchen drawer and stays where you leave it. If it does not, the springs get corrected before the opener is touched at all, and the force comes back down to where it belongs.

An annual service suits a door opening twice a day. A door that is the household's front entrance, running six or eight times, is doing three years of work in one and should be seen accordingly. The third bay holding a boat is the opposite case entirely: it wants looking at because it sits still, not because it works hard. Either way, booking before winter beats booking after it.

Between visits there is very little to do and two things worth doing. Run the little-used door by hand every few weeks. Listen for a change in the noise rather than for any particular noise. And keep the bottom of the tracks clear, because grit ground under a roller does more harm than anything else you could leave lying on a garage floor.