Do Your Garage Doors Get Stuck from Winter Ice Buildup?

During 2006, we replaced our old, wooden sectional garage doors with newer trim-looking metal insulated garage doors. Very nice looking garage doors, I must admit. Though the new garage doors were not the very top of the quality scale, they certainly were not the bottom, either. Our new garage doors fell somewhere in the upper-middle, as I recall when making our selection. At the same time, we replaced the garage door electric openers too, as one of the existing ones had failed, and the other was getting old.

The new garage doors and garage door openers were installed by contractors normally engaged in such installations, and hired by the home center where we purchased the garage doors and garage door openers. The initial installation went well, and appeared to be good, quality workmanship.

The new garage doors and garage door openers worked very well through most of 2006 New England weather, until we had some ice-storms and wet, freezing rains, which built up ice at the base of the new garage doors. Upon attempting to open the garage doors with the garage door openers, both of the garage doors remained “stuck” in the ice that had formed below and around the rubber seals at the base of the garage doors. As the garage door openers attempted to pull the garage doors free, the top sections of each garage door buckled, so it was about 2 inches from its original “flat” position. Only after I kicked the bottom of the garage doors free did they finally release from the ice.

These particular garage doors apparently are not reinforced too well across the top sections to prevent them from buckling the way these did. I am not certain whether such reinforcement is available in pricier models, but in retrospect, it might have been worth looking into that last year when we were making our selection! Nonetheless, I was able to straighten the sections back to approximately where they belong, but I am still not pleased that these garage doors would suffer such damage from what the old, wooden garage doors seemed to take in stride for many years!

I am also not sure why the new garage door operators did not automatically shut off when they “sensed” the garage doors were not lifting, and that is something I still need to follow up on with the supplier or manufacturer. Such operation could lead to catastrophic damages and even injury, should the garage door opener be powerful enough…perhaps even to collapsing the operator mountings, guide-tracks and more.

“Lesson-learned” and advice to homeowners:
If you live in a region with similar weather (and icing) conditions as described here, I strongly advise you to look for (or request) extra reinforcement in or on your metal insulated garage doors, to prevent damage and/or injury in situations similar to our own.

Some questions you might consider asking your supplier and/or installer are:

1) Is my garage door equipped with solid, reinforcement measures to prevent bending at the stress-point of lifting?
2) Is my garage door opener equipped with a safety shut-off which will disengage power and relieve any “strain” already exerted on the garage door, if the garage door does not lift as expected?
If either of these were present in my garage doors and garage door openers, I do not believe my new garage doors would have “buckled” the way they did. Now, we need to back-track with our supplier and installer to see what, if anything they are willing to do to help prevent future similar events from occurring to our garage doors…without us having to spend a lot more money to get that reassurance.
Wish us luck!