The garage door is one of your home’s top security features, but you have to be sure to take the right approaches to maximize its usefulness. One particular area where there may be a few basic preparation elements to consider involving your garage door: When you leave for a vacation or any other significant trip that leaves your home empty for multiple days at a time.

At Crawford Door Sales, we’re happy to not only offer a wide range of commercial and residential garage door options, including steel doors, foam-injected doors and many others, but also to provide clients with basic expertise on how to maximize the practical usage of all our doors. This two-part blog series will go over several basic recommendations we make to clients in terms of ensuring their garage is properly secured and prepared for an upcoming trip you and your family might be taking.

securing garage door vacation safety

Safety Release Mechanism

First and foremost, for garage doors that have them, your most important security-related move before leaving on vacation will be to secure the door’s safety release mechanism. This is a feature that allows you to manually open the door in case of a situation where the automatic opener malfunctions or something is trapped below — but if it’s not disengaged when you leave, a thief could easily open the door themselves, allowing them access to your home.

Make sure to read your door’s installation manual or contact us for more information on how to properly disengage this feature on your particular garage door model. If you’re unsure of what yours does, it may be best just to lock the release mechanism itself with a padlock until you get back.

Hide Garage Door Openers

Any garage door openers that might be accessible from a prospective thief or burglar should be stowed away. This is an easy task that you can complete very quickly, and it can literally save you thousands of dollars in the event of a break-in or one of your garage doors being destroyed by weather conditions or other damage.

The most common such location here: Cars parked outside your home. A thief can easily access your garage door opener from the corresponding buttons on your car key fob, so if your household consists of two separate cars, you might want to leave one in storage during a trip.

Window Covering

Another possible entry point some thieves may attempt to use in the garage area is windows within the garage door itself, so consider installing some type of secondary cover. This might be as simple as a towel or small blanket over the inside of the window, which will still allow you to gain sight into your garage even while traveling away, but it may also ward off an opportunistic thief who doesn’t want their face captured on video any more than necessary. You can also consider these coverings for any other standalone windows in the garage area.

For more on how to properly secure your garage door when leaving on a trip, or to learn about any of our garage door installation or garage door repair services, speak to the pros at Crawford Door Sales today.

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