If you live on Chicago’s North Shore, you already know what’s coming every year around November. The garage door usually isn’t the first thing on anyone’s mind when they’re getting the house ready for winter — people think about the furnace, the pipes, maybe the roof. The garage door gets ignored until it stops working, usually on the one morning you’re already running late.
Cold does real damage to a garage door over time. Metal contracts in freezing temperatures, which throws tracks out of alignment. Torsion springs lose tension faster in the cold, which is part of why so many spring failures happen in January and February instead of July. Weatherstripping around the bottom of the door hardens and cracks, which lets in cold air, and eventually snow and water too.
Snow buildup is its own problem. Even a small amount of ice on a track or roller can be enough to throw the door off balance, and once that happens the opener has to work a lot harder than it’s designed to. If your opener has been struggling a little in the fall, winter is usually when it finally gives out — the cold puts more strain on a motor that’s already tired.
We do winter check-ups for exactly this reason. It’s a straightforward visit — we look at the tracks, rollers, springs, weatherstripping, and the opener itself, and catch the stuff that’s about to become a real problem before it actually becomes one. If your door hasn’t been touched in a year or two, this is usually when we find something worth fixing before it turns into an emergency call in the middle of a snowstorm.
If you’re not sure the last time your garage door was actually looked at, now’s the time, not after the first big freeze. You can read more about our Garage Door Tune-Up & Maintenance, or our Garage Door Repair service if something’s already acting up.
We do this kind of winter prep work all over the North Shore — including Winnetka, Wilmette, Highland Park, and Morton Grove.
