Garage Door Cleaning Tips: How Not to Ruin Your Door

With spring right around the corner people in Loveland turn their attention to cleaning things up and airing things out after their long winter hibernation. They make plans to go through all the living areas and the basement as well as the deck, patio and other parts of the property.

What they don't often put on their spring cleaning list is the garage door. And that's a shame, because the garage door does yeoman's work all winter long and deserves the same kind of care and attention afforded to other aspects of the house. In this post, the garage door installation team at C&M is here to provide you with some useful garage door cleaning tips.

How to Clean Your Garage Door by the Garage Door Installation Experts

There’s a right way and a wrong way to clean the garage door. Clean it the wrong way and you might wind up calling for garage door repair. Clean it the right way and you'll help ensure its long-term performance. Here are some dos and don'ts when it comes to cleaning your garage door.

Choose the right cleaning instrument

You want something that is robust enough to remove a winter's worth of grime, but not so abrasive that it's going to scratch the panels on the door or the window panes. We suggest starting with a sponge or a clean rag. If neither of them does the trick you can graduate to a scrubbing brush. Just make sure the bristles are not too stiff or you would wind up damaging panels and calling for the aforementioned garage door repair.

Clean your garage door twice a year

It’s important to clean the garage door in the springtime to remove all the detritus that has accumulated during the long winter months. But it’s equally important to clean the door again in the fall. Why? Because summertime brings its own dirty horrors in the form of dust storms and bug swarms along with dirt, dust, pollen and who knows what else that is blown down off the mountains into Loveland. If you leave all that dirt and grime in place and then winter adds its own cornucopia of gunk, cleaning the door in the spring is going to be that much harder.

Make sure to use a mild cleaning agent

Although garage doors are built to last 20 years or more that doesn’t mean they’re indestructible. Most garage door panels have an imperceptible protective finish on them to prevent the panels from being destroyed by windborne dirt and debris. If the cleaning solution you use is too abrasive it could weaken this protective finish and shorten the life of the panels. Or, at the very least, ensure that you’ll need to have them repainted or retreated sooner rather than later.

Be patient

The door will come clean as long as you are patient and persistent. Trying to force things by using a harsh soap or a brush with abrasive bristles is just going to do more harm than good. You might even have to go over some parts of the door more than once. But it will come clean and ultimately look great, as long as you take a patient approach.

Mistakes That Could Cause Garage Door Damage

Now that you have a good idea of how to approach cleaning the garage door here are a few things you should avoid at all costs.

Resist the temptation to use a pressure washer

Pressure washers are great and have made it possible for the average homeowner to restore their driveway, pathways, deck and other surfaces to a like-new state of clean. But they’re not for the garage door. A garage door is not a slab of concrete or a collection of wooden planks. It’s a complex mechanism that has dozens of component parts each of which has to perform flawlessly for the door to work right. The force emitted by a pressure washer is enough to throw any number of those component parts out of whack, resulting in a stuck garage door or other problems.

Make sure to clean the weatherstripping

As the area’s top garage door installation specialists we can tell you without a doubt that garage door openings are rarely perfectly symmetrical. For that reason, garage doors have weatherstripping around the periphery that plugs any gaps and prevents wind, rain, cold, heat and windborne debris from getting into your garage. When you clean the garage door it’s imperative that you also show some love to the weatherstripping.

Cleaning the door when the sun is on it is not such a good idea

Nothing like a sunny day to get some cleaning done, right? In most cases, sure. But when it comes to your garage door, washing it with soapy water or some other kind of cleaning agent when the sun is beating down on it is not a great idea. The hot sun can cause the soap or other cleaning agent to break down. This is especially true if the garage door panels are hot from sitting in the direct sunlight for a few hours. When you’re done those panels will likely have a chalky appearance with visible streaks in them that prove devilishly difficult to get out.

Call Our Garage Door Repair Pros for Local Services

For prompt and effective garage door repair, garage door opener repair or any other type of garage door service get in touch with C & M by calling (970) 663-7335.