Garaga’s Most Common Garage Door Problems, and how to solve them

Garaga‘s one of the top North American garage door manufacturers, so when they talk we listen.

They recently posted a list of the most common garage door problems they encounter, and some suggested solutions.

Garaga’s Top 5 Most Common Problems with Garage Doors

1. The door opens or closes with a thud
2. The door has come off its hinges
3. Sometimes the door opens and sometimes it doesn’t…
4. When closing, the door goes down a little and then suddenly goes back up
5. There’s a power outage!

The good news is, they provide some easy DIY ideas for how to solve those problems. For instance, if your garage door is closing too hard, you may need to replace your springs (with something like Ideal Security’s Garage Door Extension Springs).

You can see their whole article here: http://www.garaga.com/blog/en/common-problems-garage-doors/

Using lights to notify your neighbors of problems

We recently got a great question about our SK627 Temperature Alarm from HomeDepot.com:

Can I get this to turn on a lamp so that low temps can be observed from outside my home?

We thought this was a super clever question.

Cottage life

We already know that our SK6 Home Monitoring Series is great for monitoring a cottage or vacation home, where you may not have internet service or want an expensive, complicated smart-home system. Our system works over regular ol’ landline telephones, doesn’t require WiFi, and works on batteries even during a power failure. It can alert you by phone to low temperatures, power failures, leaks, floods, and more.

But what if your cottage doesn’t even have a land-line?

Or you’re going on vacation and will be unreachable?

Or you’re hours away from your cottage – What will you do once you find out about a problem?

Notify your neighbors with light

A clever way to address those problems – and make sure your friends or neighbors can respond to a problem in your home – is to add a SK635 A/C Outlet Controller into your system. With the SK635, you can use any regular floor-lamp or desk-lamp to signify a problem.

Plug the SK635 into your A/C wall outlet, plug the lamp or light into the SK635, and turn on the lamp. By pairing the SK635 to a power failure sensor, a water sensor, a temperature sensor, or any of our other sensors, the lamp will turn itself on when triggered by one of those sensors.

Train your neighbors

Now all you have to do is train your neighbors. Put the lamp in your front window, and tell your neighbors to watch out for it. If they see lights on in the house, they’ll know there’s a problem. If they’ve got a spare key, they can go in and shut off the water, flip the breaker, or call for help if there’s a more serious problem.

Protecting her parents

In September, we received a question from Kim B, asking about setting up a SK6 Series security system on a cable VoIP line.

From: Kim B

Hello

I purchased a security system for my parents not realizing their home phone runs thru their cable package and not phone lines. Is there any way to make the system work with this type of connection? If not, is there another system that is compatible with cable phone?

Our SK6 Series security system is designed for reliability. One of its top features is that it doesn’t need an internet or WiFi connection, and that it can work even through power outages (when your internet service would go down). To offer the level of reliability and compatibility we wanted, we designed it to run on regular landlines.

So we asked Kim more about her situation. She told us that she was looking for a system to provide some security for her aging parents. There had been some break-ins in their area recently, and they wanted to put in place an easy but reliable system that would provide some additional security in their home.

It is actually for my parents. They just need a basic security system as there have been some break ins in their area.

In the end, Kim and her parents decided they didn’t really need a remote notification system.

[My parents] decided to do a more simple system and did not really think they needed to get a call from the alarm and a simple alarm/siren would suffice.

A local alert and siren would be enough, they felt, to deter intruders and give her parents the advanced notice to respond by calling the police or their children themselves, if needed. Our SK6 Series includes a wide range of both sensors and alarms designed to be fully customizable to consumers’ needs. Kim and her parents were able to put together a local alert system that suited their needs.

Thanks for the story, Kim!

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Do you have an interesting story about an Ideal Security product? Pictures of a unique installation? Reach out to us on Facebook, or email us at info@idealinc.com.