Category Archives: Tips and Tricks

3 Major Benefits of a New Garage Door
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There are a number of different reasons a new garage door makes sense for your home, and a few big benefits you can receive by going with such a purchase. We’ve picked the top three and detailed them below.

Increased home value. For homes that sell at $175,000 or higher, a $2,000 garage door investment could add as much as $7,000 to the resale value. That’s a great investment.

More protection. Depending on the type of garage door you have in place now, a newer garage door could provide greater security not only to the vehicles that are stored inside your garage, but to your family as well, since many garages have an entry door to the home.

A cleaner home. A new garage door with a keypad for entry can become a second front door. When coming indoors from poor weather conditions, or from a dirty job, your garage gives you a sheltered location to take off your messy items of clothing before entering the actual home. This helps keep your home clean.

Contact Premium Garage Door Service today to learn more about the different brands and models of new garage doors we carry.

5 Tips for Garage Door Safety
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Garage doors offer convenience to those who need to stow their vehicles away, but don’t want to deal with the hassle of opening and closing a door each time they need to enter or exit the garage. With anything heavy that moves, though, there are certain safety issues that need to be addressed. Here are 5 tips for staying safe around your garage door.

1. Keep the openers away from small children. Kids love to play, and by leaving a garage door opener laying around unattended, you’re basically offering them a brand new toy to play with. There are obvious risks here as far as injuries are concerned, and the children could unknowingly cause damage to your garage door or opener while playing.

2. Regularly check out your garage door. Give your garage door and all of its parts a good look at least once per month. You may find failing areas or parts before the issues become larger and more expensive.

3. Keep your garage door fully open or fully closed. Keeping your garage door partially open is an invitation for trouble. When the door opening mechanism is started again, it could go either up or down, and may collide with something.

4. Unplug the automatic opener while on vacation. This isn’t a matter of physical safety, but it could help protect your home and the belongings inside. This prevents someone who somehow hacks your code or someone who comes up with a spare garage door opener from using it to enter your garage and home.

5. Keep your remote opener out of your parked car. It’s very easy for someone to reach into your car and use your garage door opener to open your garage and possibly gain access to your home.

Interested in talking more about your North Metro garage door needs? Get in touch with Premium Garage Door Service today at (763) 607-3402.

Creative Developer Builds Smartphone Garage Door Opener
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JsChiSurf, a member of mobile phone development community XDA, wanted a way to open his current garage door with his Android smartphone. So he built a system himself.

The system consists of a custom Android application called “OpenSezMe,” which JsChiSurf wrote himself, as well as a Linux PC, and a serial port relay controller to open and close the circuit that controls the garage door’s open/close capability. The OpenSezMe application controls the garage door over a data connection, and thanks to the GPS support built into Android’s operating system, can only open or close the door if the device is within a certain distance of the home.

Interested in seeing how this custom garage door opener works? We’ve embedded a demonstration video below.

A Solar Panel Garage Door — Can It Happen?
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What if you could commute to and from work in your plug-in hybrid without the use of gas OR electricity from your home? OEMTek believes they might have the answer.

The company is now researching a solar panel garage door — a garage door constructed of solar panels, with a system that can be used to charge your plug-in hybrid vehicle. For commuters who drive between 50 to 70 miles, this would mean that you could make your trip to and from work without having to buy gas, or utilize your home’s electricity. Essentially, you’d be operating your car with free energy.

This door isn’t quite ready for prime time yet, but we’ll undoubtedly be keeping an eye out for future developments from OEMTek. Such a garage door would not only change the garage door industry, it would also serve to cut our carbon footprints down tremendously.