Maintaining your garage door springs ensures that your garage door, the largest entry into your home, performs properly for years to come. Just like water heaters or refrigerators, garage doors are one of the things in your home that you forget about until something isn’t working properly. It is important to get annual maintenance on your garage door, to ensure everything is running smoothly and properly to make sure your garage door lasts for as long as possible. The purpose of the garage door spring is to make the garage door light enough so that the garage door opener can easily move.
Gravity wants to pull the garage door down but with a well-maintained spring, your garage door will spring up quickly, quietly, and easily. It is extremely common for homeowners to go years without lubricating the door’s springs or providing any kind of maintenance to the door at all before it breaks down. But if you follow our guide below, you can avoid such break downs, keeping your garage door springs lubricated as well as the other moving parts, provided greater longevity to your garage door system.
Recommended Lubricant for Garage Door Springs
Most garage door experts recommend using white lithium or silicone spray on your garage door springs. Both of these products leave a thicker coat of grease that will stick to your springs. Although it may be tempting to use something you have on hand already, some common products–such as the classic formula of WD-40–may do more harm than good. WD-40 is a degreaser, which could remove remove lubricant and dry out the garage door springs. This can cause unnecessary friction in the springs and lead to early failure.
While WD-40 has many valuable applications, it is not recommended to use it on your garage door’s springs. The best way to keep your garage door springs lasting throughout the years is to lubricate them 1-2 times annually with either white lithium or silicone-based spray. These can easily be found at a local hardware store.
Other Ways to Extend the Life of Garage Door Springs
Extending the life of garage door springs depends on the maintenance of the rest of your garage door parts as well. Keeping your garage door springs lubricated as well as your rollers, hinges, and other moving parts as essential. This helps limit stress on the garage door and the garage door opener.
Often, we encounter doors that have the wrong size garage door springs installed, which also affects the lifespan of the garage door springs. When a garage door company is willing to give you specific pricing over the phone of what a garage door spring costs, they either are not giving you the full cost or are going to install the wrong garage door springs. Determining the proper spring size requires weighing the garage door with all components installed like struts, rollers, and hinges.
