Welcome to the first of many of these posts with information to help you with one of the biggest parts of your home, but often neglected – your garage door!
Let’s face it, garage doors aren’t really thought about unless you want/need a new one, or your existing door stops working. These posts will hopefully shed some light on maintenance and repairs, help you make decisions about different products and brands, and keep you updated on what new features and optional upgrades are available across this constantly evolving market.
Roller Doors vs. Panel lift Doors: What’s best for you?
Choosing the right garage door is crucial for functionality, aesthetics, and convenience. The most popular options are roller doors and panel lift doors, each with unique features to suit different needs.
Roller Doors
Roller doors do just that – they roll up like a roll of carpet would. They sit just above the opening of your garage in a roll, and come down in one continuous curtain. While you don’t get much variety with roller door profiles, there are some slight differences between brands and profiles – these can be found in our gallery page. All of these still operate the same and don’t require any additional head room or maintenance than normal.
All of our suppliers use Colorbond steel, and generally have the same colour availability for their standard range. You can opt to delete the centre key lock if you’d like a clean face look for your door.
Roller doors have springs inside the drum of the door that you can’t see unless you’re looking in at the end. These need to be checked and usually re-tensioned during a service. The springs should be doing most of the work lifting your door, and the motor just there for assistance. If you don’t have your door serviced and the springs are very low on tension, making the motor work harder than it should, you risk burning the motor out.
If you don’t have a motor on your door and it feels very heavy to lift by hand, there’s a good chance you’re due for some maintenance.
If your door is maintained, you could see these springs last 25 + years before needing replacement. Roller doors a great for residential as well as industrial roller doors.
Panel Lift Doors
Panel lift doors are constructed from usually 4 or 5 panels (but can be more depending on the height of the opening), are joined with either nylon (looks like black plastic) or steel hinges which allow the panels to separate and hinge when opening and the door travels up and around the bend in the track, ending up parallel to the ceiling when fully open.
These doors offer more design choices than roller doors, and individual panels can be replaced if damaged, whereas roller doors require a full replacement when damaged.
They do require more maintenance than roller doors due to having parts that roller doors don’t – hinges, wheels, cables, springs, etc, but the design choices are almost endless.
Panel lift doors are also able to be insulated, whereas roller doors aren’t.
Both kinds of doors do require servicing every year or two depending on how often it’s used.
I hope I’ve made your decision a little bit easier when deciding on what kind of door is for you, but if you have more questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out!
