With regular use, a garage door becomes difficult to open and close. You may feel it takes more effort and often creates squeaking noise. This is why you should know how to lubricate a garage door.
Lubricating a garage-door opener, chain, and door hinges at least once a year is important. It reduces noise and extends the life of your garage door equipment.
How to Lubricate a Garage Door
Materials and Supplies
Do you know what type of equipment you’d need?
- Step ladder
- Light-weight bicycle grease or lubricant such as WD-40
- Old towel or rags
- Safety gloves
Step#1
First, close the garage door. Then use a stepladder and unplug the power cord for safety. You can also disengage the garage door from the lifting mechanism.
Garage doors tend to have a lever. You can use it to disengage the garage door from the automatic lifter. It comes in handy in the event of an outage or malfunction with the garage door opener.
Your garage door opener may have a long bar extending from the garage door opener (center of garage) to the garage door. So, look for the lever along the bar. When you disengage it you can open the garage door by hand.
Now you need to reconnect the garage door opener. So, reposition the garage door manually and close the lever. Also, don’t forget to look for a connection point and align the components.
Step#2
Wear safety gloves and take an old towel or a rag. Remove excess grease and residue from the upper side of the chain.
Now smear light-weight and uniform coat grease on the upper side of the rail by hand. Also, wipe off excess oil from the chain with a rag. Another option is to spray a lubricant such as WD-40.
Look above the garage door opening and you should see a large coil/spring. Spray this coil/spring thoroughly with WD-40 lubricant.
Your garage door travels along tracks located on both sides of the door. So, spray the wheels with a lubricant.
Step#3 to Lubricate Garage Door
Using the ladder, plug the garage door opener unit back in.
Raise and lower the garage door a few times and check whether there is residual grease. Furthermore, lower the door and remove residual grease with an old rag.