If you have a garage in your home, then a garage door is something you interact with daily. These days, garage doors can be opened automatically with just the press of a button on a remote. Still, there are those that open garage doors the old fashioned way. If you open your door like this, then you have noticed that your garage door is quite heavy. If it falls on you, then your chances of making it out are very limited.
I know that you may have wondered why garage doors are so heavy, what makes them be that heavy? In other words, what affects the weight of your garage door? Let us narrow down the things that affect how much your garage door weighs.
Type of material used to make it
Garage doors come in various types and, at the same time, are made using various materials. You may think that there are just two materials used to make garage doors because you see wooden garage doors and metallic garage doors. That is just a shallow outlook.
Let’s begin with wooden garage doors. You may find two wooden garage doors of the same size, but when you measure their weight, one of them is heavier. Why is this? As much as they are both made from wood, they are made from different types of woods. The most common wood types used to make garage doors are plywood, cedar, and redwood. These woods have different densities, meaning that they have a different mass. For every type of wood, used the door’s weight will be different even if the same dimensions are used.
For the metallic garage doors, just like there are different types of wood, there are also different types of metal used to make garage doors. After being made and painted, you may not be able to tell what kind of metal was used to make it. Different metals also have different densities resulting in different masses in the same dimensions. Some will be heavier than the others. The metallic variations include steel, copper, and aluminum.
There are other materials that also determine the weight of the garage door, such as vinyl and glass. They each have different levels of weight.
Opening mechanism
If you manually open your garage door, then you will notice a difference in weight when you compare other garage doors opened manually. Different garage door openers have different rates of performance. If you are using one of high quality, then your door will feel lighter than if using normal garage door openers.
Extensions
These are the things that are attached to the garage door, such as glass windows. They affect the weight of the garage door to a small extent. It depends on your choice.
When searching for the right garage door type for you, you should always consider the type of material used to make it because it will determine how heavy your garage door will be.
