When renovating a house, people often first think of new doors and windows but forget about new garage doors. However, old garage doors are not only more energy intensive, but also a big risk towards the safety.
Outdated technology is often the main cause of accidents
Garage doors are part of many homes and they have a basic function—to protect the safety. However, if the garage door is too old, it may become a risk factor for accidents, and the old automatic door systems are especially dangerous. Is your garage door still secure to use?
Here are the most common and dangerous signs of damage to up-and-over garage doors.
1. Risk of sticking/squeezing fingers
Uncovered side frames, a missing or too small space between frame and lever arm, and too big spaces between old springs can result in high danger to squeeze the fingers.
2. Risk of getting stuck in the door
Doors fitted with operators can push up to 40kg of obstacles and must be able to reopen within 1 second to avoid them. While old doors often do not meet these requirements. High loads and inability to reopen doors are often the cause of drag accidents in children and adults as well as economic losses.
3. Risk of door's falling down
A broken spring or casters can lead the garage door to collapse completely, which is especially dangerous. The new garage door is equipped with a running track with a protective system as well as multi-spring system, so as to ensure that there is still a spare spring when one spring is damaged, which can prevent the garage door from falling down.
4. Risk of spring's sudden popping out
The risk of a spring breaking is not limited to doors falling down. In an ideal circumstance, other protective devices will keep doors from falling down, but in most cases, springs will pop out at high speeds and fly quite far, which results in accidents and economic losses. New garage doors can prevent springs from flying around.
It is quite important to prevent children from being involved in garage door accidents.
Children always have a particularly high risk of safety accidents because they cannot anticipate the high risk and are easily attracted to the process of doors closing or opening automatically. For example, when a child walks through a closed door to pick up a ball, an old motor may cause the garage door to press against the child. If the motor does not stop and rise automatically, it may lead to bruises, fractures and even suffocation to children. To reduce the risk, lower lightweight road brakes can be used to stop the operation and reopen before children or other objects hit the road brakes.
Here we kindly recommend you to contact professionals to check your garage door regularly. When changing garage door, it would be great buy the garage door together with the operator of the same brand. In this way the two parts can fit well to each other and ensure a good synergy.
