Most of what we get called out for in January could have been caught in October. A tune-up is the cheapest visit on this list and the one that prevents the expensive ones.
There is a clear pattern to garage door work in West Michigan. The phones go quiet through the summer, and then the first genuinely cold morning of the season arrives and every company in Kent County is booked solid for a week. The failures are not random. They are springs that were already at the end of their cycle life, rollers that were already seizing with salt, and seals that were already too hard to squash flat.
A service visit in September or October catches all three while they are still cheap, and it is the difference between a planned sixty dollar part and an emergency call on a Saturday in January.
Balance. The single most useful test on a garage door. With the opener disconnected, the door should stay put when lifted halfway by hand. If it drops or rises on its own, the spring tension is wrong, and everything downstream of that, the opener especially, is working harder than it was built to.
Rollers and hinges. Every roller should turn freely by hand. Any that do not get replaced. In this climate that is the most common finding of the whole visit.
Salt and debris in the lower track. Cleaned out properly rather than sprayed over. Salt residue in a track is abrasive and it holds moisture against the steel.
Cables and bottom brackets. Checked for fraying and corrosion at the bottom corners, which is where they fail here.
Bottom seal. Checked for hardness and cracking, because a hard seal is what makes a door freeze down.
Opener force and safety reverse. The door should reverse when it meets resistance. This gets tested, not assumed, and the photo eye sensors get realigned if they have drifted.
Use a proper garage door lubricant, a silicone or lithium based product made for the job. Do not use WD-40. It is a water displacer and a solvent, and its actual effect on a garage door is to strip out the lubricant already in the hinges and bearings. Doors that get sprayed with it every autumn are quieter for about a fortnight and then noisier and stiffer than they started.
Lubricant goes on the hinges, the rollers' stems and bearings, the springs and the bearing plates. It does not go on the track. The track is a running surface, not a bearing surface, and oil in a track collects grit and salt and turns into grinding paste.
Once a year is right for most households, and in this climate autumn is the time to do it. A door that gets used four or more times a day, or an older door on a salted driveway, benefits from a check every spring as well.
Disconnect the opener with the red release cord, lift the door to about waist height, and let go. A correctly balanced door stays roughly where you put it. If it slams down or drifts up, the springs need adjusting, and the opener is carrying weight it was never meant to carry.
The safe parts, yes: clearing the track, checking rollers turn, testing the safety reverse, looking at the cables, and lubricating with the right product. Leave anything involving spring tension or the bottom brackets alone. Those are the two places people get hurt.
It removes the most common cause, which is a bottom seal that has gone hard and no longer squashes flat. It will not change the weather, but a good seal and a clear threshold is most of the battle.
Related: Frozen & Stuck Doors · Spring Repair · Cable Repair
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