The Safest Garage Doors for Your Car

Which Garage Door Offers the Most Protection?

Garage doors come in different designs and materials. Knowing which ones put your car at risk can help you better identify which ones offer protection.

Single-skin Steel Up-and-over

Most of today’s homes have these doors. Unfortunately, these are the weakest, too. Up and over doors are made from thin sheets of steel, which makes them easy to kick in. Once the corners of the door are pried open, it can be lifted. The locks that come with these doors are pretty much useless, too. They are usually T-handles or slide bolts that can be easily bypassed with a screwdriver. If this is the door design you currently have, you should be considering an upgrade for the protection of your car.

Timber Up-and-over

There is an aesthetic advantage with timber doors as compared with steel doors but not a functional advantage. The capability of these doors is about the same. In fact, if these timber doors are warped or swollen, they can be even worse. These are also easily pried open.

Roller shutters

Cheap shutters don’t interlock, so their bottom slats can be lifted with a car jack. Slats that interlock make jacking them up from the bottom much harder. Adding security with electric shutters is also harder. If a shutter’s drive mechanism is exposed, it can be easier to break. Check how your electric shutter is mounted.

Sectional doors

These slide along the ceiling and consist of interlocking horizontally sliding panels. Good sectional doors are twin-skinned doors. The doors may consist of two separate steel panels with a foam core, making them harder to kick in. These doors also tend to have lateral locking mechanisms, which have no central locking point.

Side-hinged doors

These consist of two doors which open outwards as a cupboard does. If a car is coming in or out of a garage that has these, the outward swinging doors are actually a security advantage, since it’s harder to force these types of doors compared to the kind that swing inwards. A better secured door is also harder to break. For the best security, install a five-lever mortice lock. These types of locks cannot be broken as easily as a simple latch.

Upkeeping Secured Doors

A sectional or shutter door that is poorly maintained loses its advantage. A door that is no longer flush in its frame because of worn rollers or a sagging track will now create gaps. Those gaps defeat the purpose of twin-skin steel. In addition, locking points that have seized due to neglect are often left disengaged by fed-up owners. This inevitably turns a once-secured door into an unsecured door. This is something that should be checked often rather than assuming the door is still secure. Just because the door looks shut, does not mean it is truly functioning.

Reason why the Car Door is now a Weakness

Insecure timber up-and-over doors are the doors that need replacing to increase safety when the car is parked. Usually, the first biggest security improvement that can be made to a home is purchasing a twin-skinned sectional door, or better yet, installing a better lock on the door you already have.

Pricing on sectional doors varies a lot depending on their size, but a good lock upgrade can be well under £50, while twin-skinned sectional doors of basic design start at around £700 to £800. Given that it is an improvement up on the safety of the car parked in the garage, it is well worth the investment considering how much the value of the car is.

Check which lock is fitted if you won’t be replacing the door soon. A cheap padlock or a basic slide bolt is the same as leaving a window open. This is often the cheapest fix, and one most owners do not think to check.