Why You Should Always Hire A Professional To Repair Your Garage Door
- Casey Heinrich
- June 19, 2020
- 1:00 am
Just look around your house, and you realize that your home garage door is perhaps your biggest moving convenience, besides the car that you park there!
Garage doors are essential entry points in many houses.
Such is their significance that more than 71% of Americans claim to use them as their preferred home entry point. It is a practical option considering that most homeowners usually drive in and out of their homes.
Nonetheless, as you would expect considering the continued everyday use, opening and closing when departing and returning home, and natural wear and tear action, the doors may end up malfunctioning and necessitating repairs.
As such, your garage door can malfunction anytime and might even get you off-guard in very inopportune moments like as you are heading to work or picking your kids from school. What then do you do if your garage door is broken? Should you fix it yourself or call a professional to do it?
Despite the prevalence of DIY home improvement tip promotions on television, some jobs still need professional expertise. When your garage door is not functioning as it should, you can be tempted to ‘do the repairs yourself,’ a mantra common with many other homeowners.
However, this is not the safest or cheapest method to follow in most cases. The better option is to hire professionals for the job.
Hiring a professional to repair your garage door comes with its own set of advantages for you. If you are wondering why you should hire a garage door expert to handle your repairs, here are some top reasons:
1. Professionals come with the right tools to properly fix your garage door.
If you lack the appropriate skills or tools, a minor problem with your garage door can blow up into a situation that mandates massive and expensive repairs. Worse yet, you may even get injured.
Without both proper knowledge and experience to correctly fix your home garage door, the chances are that you may result in more damage than offering suitable solutions.
So, whether you are thinking of doing your garage door repairs on your own or any other home improvement tasks you are not well equipped for, consider these few factors before indulging:
- Is the physical labor that comes with the task worth your time?
- Are you really capable of properly doing it on your own?
- Are you ready to get your hands (and clothes) dirty?
If your answers to this question are nothing but ‘yes,’ then you need to consider hiring a professional to do the job.
Professional garage door servicing companies boast ample experience and the necessary expertise and knowledge to work out your issues. They have the proper equipment for the job, with most usually covered with appropriate and essential documentation like liability insurance and warranties. Furthermore, professional garage door repair personnel can ably troubleshoot much more accurately and quickly compared to DIY amateurs.
While it is easy for you to assume that you understand why your garage door is either creaking or squeaking, the question is, are you sure? In most cases, the solutions are never that simple. Many DIY homeowners will assume that they have accurately diagnosed and fixed their door issues, only to realize later that this was not so.
Therefore, for purposes of guaranteeing that your garage door problems are accurately identified and corrected, you need to get in touch with a qualified garage door company or expert.
2. To Minimize Potential Safety and Health Risks
Typically, garage doors are cumbersome, which means that DIY repair of your garage door can end quite severely, especially if you are uncertain of what you are doing. As such, you should hire the services of professional garage door experts to sort your problem.
While it might seem rather obvious, health and safety represent the primary concern, particularly with the DIY repair of garage doors. Considering their massive weight, it is easy to injure yourself while attempting to facilitate DIY maintenance. What’s more, with the significant weight, it can be dead weight once you tamper with any wrong components.
Besides the apparent injuries like getting your fingers caught in between the hinges as you are trying to repair, among other cuts and bruises, having a colossal door fall on either you or your pet, this turns into a significant concern. Furthermore, don’t just take our word for this, the statistics below can offer you a clear picture:
- Around 20000 individuals visit hospitals annually owing to garage door related injuries.
- According to statistics from US hospitals, DIY repairs contribute to around 1610 injuries yearly.
- About 224 individuals suffer injuries caused by malfunctioning doors that should have otherwise been repaired.
Looking at these statistics, it is essential to consult with a garage door professional to help you solve your problem. This is because dealing with garage doors mandates for an in-depth understanding of the garage door build and the complex components it is made of. By hiring experts to help clear your garage door repairs, you can stay safe and avoid the risk of getting injured, among other benefits.
3. Professionals have the expertise and experience to accurately and adequately handle your repairs.
As a homeowner, it is your responsibility always to remember that while fixing your garage door (no matter how minor the issue appears) seems a simple task; there is always more to it. The last thing you want is to go ahead and quickly fix your garage door only for it to come crashing down on you after some time because you did not evaluate and correct the primary fault.
Garage doors feature multiple components that are not only dangerous, and which require expert handling from qualified personnel who correctly understand them. All garage door components function uniformly with each other, and distorting one element can inevitably weaken or damage another part without your knowledge.
For instance, torsion springs are components standard in most garage doors. Usually, they are packed up with built-up energy in addition to functioning as the counterweight to the overall weight of your garage door.
As such, tampering with these springs can result in the release of the mentioned energy when they burst free-with 313 garage door-allied injuries annually caused by torso springs alone. Other components like panels, door rollers, cables, and tracks may also seem ‘perfectly functional’ after a ‘quick fix,’ but that may not be adequate, and may potentially cause long-term danger.
Luckily, garage door repair experts have both the experience and know-how to handle dangerous components, which is why it is always prudent to let them handle them. Hiring a qualified repair company to deal with garage door faults is a secure and effective way to not only correct the faults for good but also cut down the potential risk of injuring you and anyone in your household.
4. Fast Turnaround Time
Just think about it: if you decide to do a quick fix DIY repair on your garage door, wouldn’t it mean shouldering the whole weight of ensuring a proper job? You would need to spend time inspecting the problem, identifying where it is, and what needs to be done, as well as coming up with the necessary tactics and tools needed to solve the problem.
Conversely, when you call a professional to handle your repairs, you are confident that they will identify and solve the problem much easier and quicker. After all, isn’t it what they are trained to do? Besides this, their comprehensive knowledge and experience would mean faster diagnosis and an appropriate, permanent solution there and then!
Furthermore, considering that most of the garage doors are attached to your house directly, they are undeniably a vulnerable entry point should they get damaged. Also, opportunistic and malicious criminals may capitalize on the security gap created by a broken garage door, particularly if it is not repaired immediately or is left unattended overnight.
What’s more, a broken garage door that will not wholly close adds other risks like snow or rain, or even animals and insects penetrating your home, which could pose both security and health hazards.
By hiring an expert to repair your faulty garage door will ensure that your garage door is promptly and accurately fixed, allowing you to feel secure and safe in your house. In comparison to the hassles and time, it would take you to identify and resolve the problem; professionals can ensure a faster turnaround period. This means that you will have a correctly functioning garage door in a short while, all without the needless hassles.
5. It is Cost-Effective (in the long run)
Ideally, when many of us realize that our garage door is not functioning correctly, the idea to get someone to do a ‘quick fix’ or simply decide to do fix it ourselves crosses our minds.
While this may be driven by the need to conveniently and cheaply solve the problem (at least for the short term), the question we forget to ask ourselves is whether this is a practical approach in the long run. So, does a quick and convenient solution to solve our garage door issue in the long term?
Despite being a seemingly cost-effective idea, having a half-baked repaired garage door often does more damage over time and can lead to you having to cough up more money for more repairs in the long term anyway. But by enlisting the services of a professional garage door repair company, you can be sure that the problem is fixed correctly. Therefore you don’t have to worry about additional accumulative costs in the long run.
6. Convenience:
Naturally, we often feel proud once we make a successful move that would otherwise call for experts. This explains the resurgent popularity of DIY projects in recent times, especially with homeowners. Many of us assume that if we repair our garage doors ourselves, we will learn about how various components work and perhaps save some funds. Regardless, seeking professional assistance on garage door related repairs is usually much more convenient.
If you do the repairs by yourself, you will need to do everything yourself! This means that you will not only get your hands dirty, but you will also have to do all the heavy lifting, in addition to the stress of ensuring you do everything right.
Alternatively, on hiring a garage door technician to do your repairs, you leave all the work for you, meaning that you will spend much more time on other vital commitments and jobs you need to accomplish. Also, you can rest easy that you will find your garage door in optimal condition and functioning correctly as it should, and better yet, all you need to do is call, and your work is done!
7. Quality Assurance (Warranties):
One of the essential things that virtually all professionals can help vouch for is superb quality. Numerous companies offer their customers warranties for garage doors, as a testimony of quality assurance. This effectively guarantees you peace of mind, at least for a given time frame, sometimes extending to the door’s lifetime.
Essentially, by hiring a professional, not only are you paying for repair services, but partially for the experience, knowledge, convenience, and assurance that your door will be fixed appropriately and re-fixed should the issues re-emerge in the future.
8. Maintenance Services
Essentially, while properly repairing your home’s garage door is fantastic, wouldn’t it much better if say, the door wasn’t malfunctioning in the first place? Well, the best way to ensure this is to hire a professional to inspect and troubleshoot your door.
This is especially important since these experts can often detect sections of your garage door that require immediate or necessary maintenance. Spotting your door problems early before they escalate for the worst may help you avoid potential safety and health hazards as well as save you significant bundles of repair and replacement-related money.
In some instances, all your garage door requires is a little cleaning or lubrication, or just a component that needs replacement. Having a professional do your garage door maintenance periodically will help ensure that it remains in perfect working condition always!
9. Emergency Repair Servicing
More often than not, your garage door may malfunction without any warning or sign. Unfortunately, you can encounter this nuisance either early in the morning as you are getting ready to head to work or school or during unconventional night hours.
In such cases, then emergency repair services can be your saving fortress. Many garage door repair companies offer these convenient services, and lucky for you, all you need is to give your preferred garage company, and they will get to your home, inspect, and solve your issue.
10. Help Limit Your Liability
Most homeowners are unaware of the fact that if you sell your home and the new owner gets injured by your faulty garage door, he or she can file for an insurance claim.
As surprising as it sounds, if it is determined that you (the former owner) fixed the garage door yourself or used an unqualified DIY individual for the repairs, you are liable to pay them for the subsequent injuries. This is why you must hire experts to fix any garage issues, as this will help you avoid any potential insurance claims and lawsuits.
11. For Insurance Reasons
If you have never dealt with insurance companies before, then you should be warned that the process can be rather exhausting. Generally, many home insurance firms only pay for any damage to your garage doors only if a qualified garage door repair firm does the repairs.
Handymen, freelancers, or skilled family members (including yourself) are viewed as a liability by the insurance company since they lack the necessary credentials or paperwork to vouch for their expertise as skilled garage door repairers properly.
Hiring garage door professionals for your repairs who will provide you with all the essential documentation means that you have a better chance of coercing your home insurance firm into releasing a payout.
