Essential Garage Door Safety Features for Your Home

Garage doors are the largest moving piece in most households. As a homeowner, it is important to know which safety features to look out for when installing a garage door. These safety features help protect your family from unnecessary injury when operating the door. Here are some essential safety features that you can look out for.

1. Electric and Contact Sensors

There should be two electric sensors on either end of the garage door. If anything breaks the beam while the door is closing, it automatically stops and starts to open up again.

Additionally, there should be a contact sensor in the garage door unit, which reverses the operation of the garage door when it touches an object. This safety feature prevents anything or anyone from being crushed or bumped by the garage door operation.

2. Panel Lift Door Safety

Panel lift garage doors consist of a group of panels joined together by a hinge. They are usually operated with remote devices; therefore, they have no handles. Sometimes, you might have a power failure and have to operate the door by hand.

It is important to note that the panels can separate when opening the door. The spaces between the panels can be a very tempting hand holding position to try and open or close the door, but this might lead to breaking your finger or badly bruising your hand.

Safety improvements that have been made are to ensure there are no gaps between the panels from the inside or the outside. The edges of the panels should be double rolled so there's no chance of cutting your fingers on any sharp edges.

3. Balance

The balance of the garage door can also tell you a lot about how safe it really is. If you disable the electric opener and open or close the garage door manually, it should slide up and down fairly easily by using one arm. If it comes crashing down because of imbalanced weight, then you need to call in a professional to adjust your torsion spring.

4. Roller Shield

Safety commissions advise against the risk of children touching moving rollers. Older garage door units had open tracts where rollers would run up and down. The tracts also had the potential to cut you if you slid your hand or finger along them.

Nowadays, garage doors have curved and enclosed roller shields that not only keep children away from the rollers, but also protect the user from any cuts by the tracts. If you have an older garage door with exposed rollers and tracts, it is time for a safety upgrade.