The garage door: the fault that costs most to ignore

It opens and closes twenty times a day, weighs hundreds of kilos, and almost no community inspects it until it stops working.

Why this is not just about convenience

A motorised garage door is heavy machinery in motion, with vehicles, children and pedestrians around it. Machinery regulations require it to have working safety systems: obstacle detection (photocells or a safety edge), an emergency stop, and an accessible manual release so people can get out during a power cut.

If the photocells are dirty, misaligned or — this happens more often than you would think — disabled because they kept giving false triggers, the door has stopped being safe. That is the real risk, and the liability sits with the community.

The maintenance that prevents almost everything

• Greasing and inspection of runners, bearings and chain, once or twice a year.
• Cleaning and testing the photocells: one of the cheapest items and the one that fails most.
• Testing the manual release, and making sure residents know where it is. It is little use if only the chair knows.
• Checking springs and counterweights on up-and-over doors: that is the part which, when it goes, goes suddenly.
• Confirming the remote and the access system still work for whoever is entitled to them.

When it breaks

It tends to break at the worst possible moment with half the cars inside. It pays to have the service company's number visible in the garage and the hallway beforehand, and to know whether the contract covers out-of-hours call-outs or whether those are charged separately.

And the awkward conversation

A door stuck open for days is an open invitation. If the repair is going to take a while, a temporary measure has to be decided there and then — manual locking, surveillance, notice to residents — rather than leaving the garage open "until they come".