4 Benefits of an Insulated Service Door

As a business owner, you strive to provide excellent products and services to your customers, and a quality workplace for your employees. One easy way to do that is by installing a quality, insulated service door that provides additional climate control, energy-efficiency, noise reduction and safety to your workplace environment.

Climate Control

An insulated service door provides excellent climate control when you need thermal or cooling efficiency for your business operation. It will keep your indoor temperatures even and prevent you from making thermostat adjustments every time outdoor temperatures rise and fall. You have no control over the weather conditions, but you can easily control your business environment with an insulated service door. Any type of business will benefit from a comfortable work environment, but for businesses that produce or store electronics, pharmaceuticals, antiques, furs, food, or other items that can be damaged by heat and cold, insulated service doors are essential to business operations.

Energy-Efficiency

Every business owner knows that an energy-efficient workplace can save thousands of dollars each month on heating and cooling costs. A service door that isn't properly insulated can let outdoor hot and cold air indoors, even through the smallest cracks around the door or door seals when the door is closed. An insulated service door will keep your business warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer with more even temperatures from room to room. If you have a large warehouse with hundreds of employees, an insulated service door will help to provide a more comfortable, year-round work space that can increase employee production and reduce employee illness.

Noise Reduction

Excessive noise levels are often an unpleasant workplace factor for many businesses, especially those in manufacturing industries. In industrial settings where there are hundreds of workers on an assembly line or operating machinery, noise levels can be deafening at times. A service door that's properly insulated with a quality, dense polyurethane foam can reduce noise levels in adjacent areas by a significant amount. Rather than the noise from workers and machinery echoing off of a thin steel or aluminum service door, a lot of the interior noise will be absorbed by the foam insulation. An insulated service door will also keep noise from the outside from entering the workplace.

Safety

Although most commercial service doors are made from steel or aluminum, they don't always provide adequate safety from burglaries and break-ins. Doors that have no insulation are thinner, lighter and easier to puncture or damage. Safety is important to any type of business to protect equipment, merchandise and employees. Whatever type of business you operate, a burglary can cost you thousands and thousands of dollars in lost production time and lost revenue. An insulated service door that's stronger and more durable will provide additional protection for your business against unwanted and unexpected theft. It will also provide additional wind resistance against storms that bring heavy rain and strong winds.

Although an insulated service door for your business may cost you a little more up front, the benefits will pay for the extra costs in no time. Whatever type and size of business you have, an insulated service door is a great investment. As a business owner, you can help protect your business, your investment, and your employees with a top-quality insulated service door that offers many advantages.

5 of the Most Common Garage Door Issues

Garage doors are built to take heavy use and most get it. A typical residential garage door goes up and down over a thousand times a year. Considering the amount of wear and tear garage doors receive, most models provide faithful, trouble-free service for many years when properly installed and maintained. When malfunctions do happen, many require the services of a qualified garage door service technician to properly diagnose and repair. However, a few DIY tips can point the way to resolve simple issues, or at least enable you to narrow down the source of the trouble and describe it more accurately to service personnel.  

Here are five common garage door problems:

• Door is in open or closed position and unresponsive. If the unit is an automatic garage door opener that utilizes a remote control, dead batteries in the remote should be your first suspect. It’s an easy do-it-yourself task to install fresh batteries and try again. Still no response? Photo-electric sensors that tell the unit whether the door position is open or closed may be defective, out of adjustment or the drive motor itself may have failed. If the door is stuck in the closed position, make sure no one has locked the throw latch that secures the door from the interior. A trained garage door service tech from a reputable local dealer can further troubleshoot the cause and recommend needed repairs.

• Door begins to close, then abruptly reverses and opens again. All garage doors have a safety feature to prevent the door from closing on a person or object. If the internal sensor detects a blockage as the door is closing, it will automatically reverse the motor. Assuming there’s nothing in the way to block free motion of the door, the most likely causes are binding in the track due to lack of lubrication, defective track wheels or misaligned tracks. A defect in the internal sensing circuit is another possible cause.

• Door slams shut rather than lowering gently. On a manual garage door, heavy-duty springs counteract the weight of the door to ensure smooth opening and closing. If the springs are stretched, broken or disconnected, however, the door’s weight will be excessive and the door will slam shut when manually lowered. These springs are powerful and dangerous—let a pro handle this problem. For an automatic garage door, the problem is either in the sensors on either side of the door that turn off the motor at the proper position or in a limiting adjustment typically called “Up Force” and “Down Force” found on the motor. A qualified garage door technician has the equipment and expertise to diagnose and repair or adjust the system for smooth operation.  

• Motor hums, but door doesn’t open or close. This can be narrowed to two likely causes. First, the door trolley–the chain- or screw-driven component that moves up and down the central track to open and close the door may be defective. A professional can replace the trolley as an individual component. Second, internal motor drive gears may have jammed due to wear and/or stripped entirely. Having a new garage door opener installed is usually the most cost-efficient solution.  

• Light doesn’t illuminate when door is opening or closing. First, check the bulb. If it appears to be burned out, replace it. Sometimes a circuit board problem can fail to switch on the light, too. Reset the circuit board by unplugging the garage door opener from the AC power outlet for 30 seconds, then plug it back in again. Still in the dark? Time to call for professional garage door service.

6 Tips for Making Your Garage Burglar Proof

Your garage door may represent a big gap in an effective home security strategy. Many garage doors are routinely left unsecured and older models may be of flimsy construction that’s easier for a burglar to pry or break than a solid-core front or back exterior door. Once inside an attached garage, a thief can close the door for concealment, then take his time gaining entry to the main house. Of course, since many homeowners utilize the garage as a household storage area, it often isn’t even necessary to break into the home itself to hit the jackpot. Plenty of attractive high-value items may be easily accessible in the garage alone. In some cases, thieves may even utilize your garage to back in a truck or van for extra convenience and cover while moving large valuables out of your home.

To strengthen this weak link in the chain of home security, here are six tips to make your garage burglar-proof:

• Don’t leave it open. Sure, it’s a no-brainer. But cruise through any residential neighborhood during the day and count how many garage doors you see standing wide open with nobody inside or even visible anywhere on the premises. Don’t fall for the “It can’t happen here” myth. Local law enforcement authorities can tell you that no neighborhood is immune to burglaries and theft.

• Cover the garage door windows or apply frosted window film. Don’t make it easy for thieves who want to peek into your garage to check for a vehicle parked inside—a sign that somebody’s home—or casually window-shop for valuables inside that they want to steal. Also pay attention to the status of the door leading from the garage into the house. This door should incorporate a wide-angle peephole—not a glass window—to make the garage fully visible from indoors without providing thieves with an easy break-in point and/or a way to see into the house. Also, make sure the door is fitted with a heavy deadbolt lock.  

• Select a garage door opener that incorporates “rolling code” technology. This enhanced security automatically creates a new random remote code every time you open your door with the remote control. Because there are billions of possible codes, this feature makes it almost impossible for thieves utilizing common code-grabbing devices to defeat.

• Secure the garage door emergency release handle. Thieves frequently find it easy to reach the emergency release handle and open the door from the outside using nothing more than a bent coat hanger. Securing the handle with a single zip-tie or thin string makes it much more difficult to hook from outdoors, but still easy to pull indoors in case of an emergency.

• Close and latch overnight and when you leave town. When closing up for the night or if you’re going to be away from home for an extended period, don’t rely on simply closing your door with the opener. Go ahead and utilize the interior throw latch that manually locks the garage door track, physically securing the door so it can’t be raised. Most throw latches incorporate an opening so the latch can be padlocked in the closed position for added protection against break-in when you're out of town.

• Keep up with routine maintenance. Inspect the garage door annually for wear and tear in components that may make it easy to force open or otherwise defeat. Look for signs such as rust or corrosion, a gap where the door meets the garage floor (an easy pry point for thieves) or a track that has loosened from its mounting points.