Five Good Reasons to Keep Your Garage Door Closed
Unless you have someone in to fix the garage door there is no excuse for leaving it open. The garage door after all is not some tiny, out of the way window, it’s the largest single component of your home’s exterior, the largest single moving object associated with your home and, for most people with an attached garage, the primary entrance to the home. You wouldn’t leave the front door open for no reason. And there is no excuse for leaving garage doors open either. To make our point, our garage door professionals present five good reasons to always keep the garage door closed.
Home Security
The most obvious reason to keep your garage door closed is to prevent thieves and assorted weasels from walking in and helping themselves to your belongings. But it’s not just your TV and PS4 console that are at stake. The safety of everyone in the home is also compromised by leaving the garage door open when you’re not using it. It’s a fact that even if someone doesn’t enter your home with the intention of hurting anyone, once they encounter someone inside things are liable to escalate quickly. Either because the intruder wants to intimidate the homeowner or the family member wants to protect their turf.
Garage Security
Even if the garage is not attached to the house many people still keep a small fortune in power tools and other items stored there. Leaving the door open is an invitation to thieves. It’s like a weasel buffet where they get to pick and choose the items they feel they can most comfortably make off with. Keep in mind also that once thieves have your home down as an easy mark they’re going to keep their eyes on it. Which means that while you’re inside watching TV or chatting with friends on social media, someone could be outside watching and taking notes, planning their next invasion. Police statistics prove that thieves will go back to the same well over and over if they find it’s easy to drink from.
Read our earlier content for ten recommended ways to improve garage security.
Pest Prevention
A lot of critters that share this part of the world with us might seem like they’re pretty hearty, and many of them are. But like the heartiest humans even the toughest animals will seek out a higher degree of comfort. So if you leave your garage door open you can expect that at some point you’ll be playing host to all manner of uninvited guests including but not limited to squirrels, mice, feral cats, raccoons, snakes, birds and more. Once they set up house in your garage they can be devilishly difficult to dislodge. That’s particularly true for raccoons, squirrels and snakes. Although birds can be a handful too and can sometimes leave so many droppings that you wind up needing garage door opener repair or a thorough track cleaning.
Energy Conservation
The average price of crude oil in 2002 was $26.19 per barrel. In 2022, that price had nearly quadrupled to an average cost per barrel of $100.93. Translation: none of us can afford to waste energy. But that’s exactly what happens if you leave the garage door open when you’re not using it. If you’ve called for garage door repair and the technician has the door open while working on it, that’s one thing. But if you retrieved the snow shovel from the garage and then left the garage door open while you cleared the driveway, that’s going to wind up cooling the entire house and forcing the furnace to burn more oil to keep things warm. Homeowners often don’t think about the effect an open garage door can have on the rest of the house - but they should. If the garage is open to the elements it’s going to suck air out of any adjoining rooms and vent it straight into the atmosphere.
Damage from Weather
There are approximately 89 inches of annual snowfall in Boulder. It’s also pretty common for the local temperature to plunge to 0 Fahrenheit. And don’t get us started on the Chinook winds. In a typical summer there are more than 30 days when the temperature exceeds 90 degrees. Now, you may ask what a Littleton garage door repair company is talking about the weather for. Well, it’s because if you leave the garage door open it doesn’t usually take long before some of that heat, wind, cold and/or snow invades and ruins furniture, rugs, artwork or other things you might have stored in the garage. Power tools are not big fans of snow either. Neither, for that matter, is your garage door opener, auto-reverse system, tracks, rollers or springs.
Keeping the garage door closed is the right thing to do no matter how you look at it. It will save you money and energy while preventing your home from being targeted by thieves - both now and in the future. It will also likely save you from having to call for garage door repair in Loveland because weather or animals have caused damage. If you’re having problems with your door that are preventing it from closing all the way call A Better Garage Door's garage door installation and repair team for prompt, affordable garage door services today.