How Safe is your garage?

New garage doors are equipped with safety features that help prevent accidents or other dangers from occurring. Keeping your garage safe, however, involves more than locking the door at night.

There is a multitude of avoidable vulnerabilities that you can prevent through simple prevention and security monitoring methods.

Technology Improves Garage Security

The ability to monitor your home from anywhere in the world has been possible for several years, giving homeowners a chance to personally respond to threats and problems from any remote location with a reliable internet signal. In addition to alerting authorities of fire, theft and other illicit activities, you can open and close garage doors, turn lights on and off and interact directly with anyone inside your home.

As more security systems adapt to become part of the internet of things, homeowners will enjoy a wider range of solutions and increased automation. For example, some garage doors are now programmed to automatically sense your presence, opening the panel for you or your family members and staying shut for everyone else.

Obsolete technology, especially garage door openers that are older than a decade or so, no longer provide security that may be relied upon. In fact, if your remote uses a fixed code system, a thief can simply use a hack that automatically cycles through every possible two‑digit code, eventually stumbling upon the correct pair.

At the very least, your garage door should use a rolling code remote signal. This simple change makes it much more difficult to hack the code by switching the correct two‑digit solution to a different number each time an incorrect signal is sent.

Strong Doors and Panel

Technology doesn’t do much good if an intruder doesn’t have much of a problem physically accessing your garage. Intrusion prevention works best when an intruder has to spend time struggling against a physical barrier to get in, giving the authorities time to respond to the crisis. A strong door or garage panel can give your family enough time to escape the situation or reach a safe room that intruders will have problems breaching.

If your garage has a side door or a back door that allows people to enter, you want to make sure that the door is made of solid‑core materials that are hard to puncture, backed up by deadbolt locks and door jambs. The fewer and smaller the windows of the door and the panel, the more secure the structure.

Garage door can be unlocked from the outside by a crafty thief familiar with how the emergency release works. Using a strong wire, such as a common coat hanger, thieves can thread between the door frame and the rubber seal at the top of the panel. This way, the intruder can trigger the manual release, and all they have to do is lift the door open, giving skilled break and enter artists access in less than half a minute.

You should consider buying a garage shield pad made in standard ABS plastic that prevents the door from lifting when the manual trigger is released. This way, your door will be secured against this hack while you arrange to install a new seal.

Good Safety Habits

The best garage door security systems and solid, blast proof doors can’t help you if you leave the door open or forget to arm the alarm. In the end, keeping your garage safe is entirely up to you, which means that you should consider developing good safety habits if you notice that every now and then you come home to an open garage door or an unarmed monitoring system.

Establish a maximum time that the garage door stays open, in case you forget to trigger the remote to close the panel. Cover any windows with curtains to hide valuables within the garage and install a peephole that allows you to see what’s going on outside without opening the door.

Secure Garage Panels and Openers

Your garage door is one of the biggest and most obvious targets for thieves casing a neighbourhood for an easy mark. If they see an old, dilapidated garage door next to a pristine system, there’s a good chance that they will take note of your property as unlikely to be secure. New garage doors send a strong signal that states your home isn’t a soft target.

Garaga remains the industry standard for durability and reliability, as we have sold over 1.7 million quality garage doors since 1983.

You can click here to get a free quote, or click here to start by building your perfect garage door!