How to Lubricate Your Garage Door and Opener Properly

During the winter months or arid season, your garage door becomes more susceptible to environmental damage. While making the door shiny with a nice anti-rust coating or replacing the rubber track on the bottom may seem important, but it’s not compared to the garage door when it needs proper lubrication.

Keeping your door lubricated will ensure that it doesn’t ever lock up or break, and fall off of its tracks. Here are some simple steps to keep your door lubricated this winter.

Step 1 – Choose your Grease not Oil!

The number one mistake that most do it yourself fanatics make is to use oil instead of grease, or WD40 instead of grease made products. Using WD40 on the door is of course acceptable but you will be paying to repair your door a lot quicker. WD40 is made of oil and is a degreaser, so you can see why spraying a degreaser unto a door track that needs greasing to work can be problematic.

The best type of grease you can use is a Lithium based grease but if you can’t find a Lithium spray then you can use a Silicon spray. Both can be used and are a lot better than using oil. Being sprayed on the door, the oil will drip and not stay put, which can ruin your door track.

Step 2 – Spraying rollers

You want to lubricate all moving parts on the door. Depending on your height and eyesight level, you may want to grab a step stool or ladder to reach those hard to get to places.

Close the door and disconnect it from the motor. You are going to want to spray all the movable parts by moving the door up and down the bendable track part of the door as it leaves most of the metal exposed for greasing.

A. Plastic and Metal rollers are the most common types of rollers for doors. A plastic roller can be greased but it won’t help much as these are designed to only last a couple of years. As far as the metal roller, the ball bearings are inside of the center and you will need the small spray tube to make sure the grease reaches them.

B. Precision doors use a closed in ball bearing so there is no maintenance.

Step 3 – Spraying Pulley’s

The older that your pulley gets the more wiggle room it will have and at this point in time, grease would be pointless and they would need to be replaced anyway. You want to keep pulleys greased from the start to prevent oxidation.

Step 4 – Greasing the opener

Do not grease up the chain, this is a mistake most make. You want to lubricate the top of the rail but you don’t need to grease the door tracks, just clean them. You want to make sure that your door’s spring system stays clean. Only a torsion spring needs grease which is done simply by spraying the spring and running the door up and down a few times.

This blog was provided by Littleton Garage Door Service, a company that services garage doors Littleton CO based company. Aurora garage door repair is also available.

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