Safety Features on Garage Doors

If you are the parent of young children, you may justifiably be concerned about the safety features associated with your garage door. Garage entry ways are large and heavy (especially if you have a steel door), and they move automatically on mechanized tracks. It is easy to imagine the dangers they could pose to toys, garbage cans, and anything else left accidentally in their path, most especially including a small child.
There was a time in the past when this was a real issue surrounding the use of automatic garage doors. Thanks to technology, though, that problem has been largely remedied. Modern garage entry doors come with a number of safety features designed to protect our vehicles, possessions and children. Even older garage entry door opener models commonly have a feature which causes the door to reverse direction if it encounters an obstacle of any kind. Government mandated safety standards made this a non-optional feature in 1993.
Newer garage door systems get even fancier: sensors, placed near the ground on either side of the door, detect any obstruction in their path, and will not allow the door to close at all, or will cause it to reverse. Even a piece of paper blown through the door way at the wrong moment can keep the door from closing. In addition, these sensors can be programmed to turn the light on any time someone walks in or out of the garage through the open door. Another feature of many new garage doors are joints that are design to push fingers out rather than pinch them.
If you have a garage doorway or opening system that predates 1993, you should test it by placing an obstacle underneath it and see if it reverses. You can also do this by leaning on the door as it comes down. If the door does not respond on its own, then you have a dangerous garage door and should serious consider buying a new one, especially if you expect to have children around. Even if you know for certain your system is more recent, it is still a smart idea to test the safety features on your garage door system at least one a year. A good car port door system should 1) refuse to close if something is blocking the line of the sensors, 2) reverse if something breaks the line of the sensors while it is descending, 3) reverse if it hits something or has any particular pressure put on it. All these features are easily checked.
A garage port door that opens and closely automatically is a very convenient thing for any homeowner to have, and most of us can barely imagine having to actually climb out of our cars to open the door for ourselves. Thanks to technology, it is also a safe thing to have, as long as you have a system that is less than seventeen years old and still in good working order.

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