Garage Door Safety Measures

How often do you think about your garage door other than to push the remote button to open or close it as you come home or head out?

Automatic garage doors are designed to be as simple for you to use as pushing a single button and the door opens or shuts. With keyless entry systems, your children can come home from school to a locked house and quickly get in the house by entering the code, rather than having to worry about taking care of a key all day long. You have the convenience of pressing the button, waiting a moment while the door opens and driving your car into the garage to unload your groceries.

You may not realize that there are safety measures built into garage doors. However, if your doors are not properly adjusted, they may not work properly and could possibly cause damage or injury. If the door were to suddenly close without the button being pressed, you can imagine the problems that it could create.

Even though we often take garage doors for granted, we should teach our children to be careful around them and never let small children play with the remote opening devices. It is never a good idea to push the button and then run out of the garage, beating it before it closes; that sets a poor example for the children.

The best thing to do is to lead by example and wait until the door is either fully open or closed before getting close to it. One of the most important safety measures utilized by garage doors is the safety sensor system. This system sends a beam of light from one sensor to the other. When the beam is broken, the door does not continue to shut. This helps you keep your kids and pets safe, because if a small child were to cross the path of the garage door when it was closing and it did not stop, you could have some serious injuries.

It is a good idea to check your manual on how to care for these sensors, but the most important thing is to keep the clean of dust, dirt, and cobwebs, and to occasionally check their alignment. If you have ever pressed the button to shut the door and just got a blinking light rather than a shutting door, you know that something is in the way of the security beam and you can check out the problem and remove it before proceeding.

Childproofing Your Garage Door

Most new parents make the effort to create a safe environment for their children in the house, but often they don’t extend that effort into the garage.

That’s a mistake, because it’s hard to keep kids away from the garage, and what they can find there could very dangerous indeed. Here are some tips to reduce any threats posed to children in your garage.

• Check the sensitivity of the “contact reverse” feature of your electric garage door opener several times per year. Place a 2×4 (wood) flat in the doorway. Close the door with the wall control. If the door does not reverse (that is, start to open) after contacting the 2×4, decrease the “close” force on the opener and try again.
• Make sure the wall control for the garage door opener is installed high enough that it can’t be reached by young children.
• Put a lock on the door from the house to the garage to keep children from wandering into the garage without your knowledge.
• Store toxic and flammable substances (including matches), power tools and sharp hand tools well out of a child’s reach, preferably in a locked cabinet.

Childproofing your home is not that easy. You need to consider countless of things and think of unexpected scenarios that are possible to happen. Since this is your children’s safety involved, you can never be too sure. You should go through extreme lengths to keep them secure and well protected against possible harms such as those found in your garage.

Child Proofing Your Garage Door

Child Proof Your Garage

Most new parents make the effort to create a safe environment for their children in the house, but often they don’t extend that effort into the garage. That’s a mistake, because it’s hard to keep kids away from the garage, and what they can find there could very dangerous indeed. Here are some tips to reduce any threats posed to children in your garage.

• Check the sensitivity of the “contact reverse” feature of your electric garage door opener several times per year. Place a 2×4 (wood) flat in the doorway. Close the door with the wall control. If the door does not reverse (that is, start to open) after contacting the 2×4, decrease the “close” force on the opener and try again.
• Make sure the wall control for the garage door opener is installed high enough that it can’t be reached by young children.
• Put a lock on the door from the house to the garage to keep children from wandering into the garage without your knowledge.
• Store toxic and flammable substances (including matches), power tools and sharp hand tools well out of a child’s reach, preferably in a locked cabinet.