If you’re a parent, a grandparent or someone else who often has young people at your home, child safety is no doubt a priority in your life. You should know that garage doors, while wildly convenient, are also home appliances that are under massive amounts of tension. This tension helps garage doors operate properly, but it can also pose a threat to children if your garage door isn’t correctly maintained or fully working.
When your kids are old enough to be outside without constant supervision, you should teach them these easy lessons about garage door safety:
- Before you close the garage door, make sure there are no people or animals standing in the garage door’s path.
- Never leave your bike or any other toy in the garage door’s path.
- When your kids don’t know how to properly use the garage door or how to keep themselves and others safe around it, there could be injuries or damage to the mechanisms. Avoid these outcomes by having a conversation about garage door safety with your family.
Here’s a look at garage door safety tips to help keep your children safe when playing in your garage or at your home:
- Regular Maintenance
Get to know a provider of garage door maintenance in your area. Consider setting up regular maintenance appointments once a year. Your garage door professional of choice should be able to take care of a number of things, including testing of safety features, visual inspection for loose or damaged hardware, balance test, alignment test, lubrication test and more. Regular maintenance can identify problems before they spiral out of control, which should help promote child safety and reduce the chances of an accident. Regular maintenance also helps reduce costs. It’s far more affordable to address a problem before it renders your garage door completely inoperable than it is to wait for an emergency when your garage door clearly needs replacement parts.
- Check Safety Features
Your garage door includes features that promote child safety, such as Infra-red Safety Beams. These features are required by law, and you should check to make sure they are working properly. Your garage door should have an auto-reversing safety feature that reverses anytime your garage door senses an object in the way before reaching its threshold. You can test this out right now. Simply place a roll of paper towels across the garage door’s threshold. Once the door senses the roll of paper towels in the way, it should automatically reverse. If it does not, then this safety feature is not working properly, and you should contact a professional to come as soon as possible to inspect your garage door. A good professional garage door provider can also check your door’s many other safety features.
- Choose a Quality Garage Door
There’s one great place to start in promoting child safety with your garage door: purchasing a quality, dependable garage door with finger proof safety feature. You can always find off-brand, cheap alternatives, but these cheap alternatives don’t always deliver the quality and dependable performance you expect out of your garage door and its safety features. By choosing doors from trusted overhead door manufacturers, you’re investing in a track record of success. You can expect to get more for your money, and you can also expect the operation of your new garage door and its safety features to be more dependable when you choose a model made by a highly respected brand.
When you follow these safety tips for garage doors, you will feel more confident in knowing that your entire household is safe. Sometimes accidents happen. Accidents aren’t always possible to avoid. But when you and your family are aware of the possible dangers of your garage door and how to avoid them, accidents are less likely to occur.
Call us today on 1300 767 900 and book a garage door service.
