Frost Heave and Your Garage Door

Northern Illinois has a deep frost line, and concrete poured before modern practice moves with it. A garage door is a precision assembly sitting on top of that movement.

The mechanism

Water in the ground below a slab or driveway apron freezes and expands, lifting the concrete. In spring it thaws and the concrete settles back, not always to exactly where it started. The garage floor and the apron immediately outside the door are the two most exposed pieces of concrete on the property.

What it does to the door

The closed position moves. The opener has learned where the floor is, and the floor is now somewhere else. The result is a door that binds, reverses on closing, or leaves a gap along one edge - all of which look like mechanism faults.

The tell

It is seasonal. If the problem appears reliably in deep winter and has gone by April without anyone touching the door, it is frost movement. A genuine mechanical fault does not repair itself in the spring.

The mistake owners make

Adjusting the opener force or the down limit in February to compensate. Come spring the settings are wrong in the other direction, and the door is now closing harder than it should against a floor that has come back up.

What to do instead

Have the limits set for the winter position and left alone, or have the track and the closed position assessed properly rather than compensated for. If the apron is badly heaved, that is a concrete job, and it is worth knowing that before spending more on the door.

Free estimate — no charge for the visit

Tell us what the door is doing and we will tell you what it normally means in Rockford. Every job is quoted in person and in writing before any work starts.

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