What Do You Do if Your Garage Door Comes Off The Rollers?

Sometimes, it seems like you attract bad luck. This isn’t true, but it’s sure what it feels like when your garage door comes off the tracks after midnight on a weekend, and your wife is inside sleeping, not answering the phone. Any sort of home issues can be frustrating, because they never come when you have a hefty savings account, it’s always when you just paid your mortgage and have to wait until you get paid a few weeks later to call a repairman. So, what do you do if your garage door comes off the rollers?

Don’t panic

Look, it’s frustrating. We get that. The most important thing to keep in mind is that trying to mess with a garage door is dangerous. So we advise that you go in through a different port of entry, and make sure to keep any interior doors from the garage locked while your garage is broken.

Look at the rollers

We don’t recommend that you attempt to fix your garage door by yourself. In fact, we recommend you don’t even touch it, and you call a garage door repairman as soon as possible. However, it can be helpful to know what caused the garage door to go off track. So, carefully look(without touching!) at the rollers of the garage door. A garage door coming off is usually caused by one of three things.

One of the rollers wore out

If your home is old, this is probably what happened to your garage door. If one of the rollers wears out and breaks off, it won’t stay on the track properly. In this instance, you don’t have to replace the garage door(as long as no additional damage happened), and just the broken rollers need to be replaced.

The tracks aren’t aligned properly

If your garage door was installed incorrectly, it’s possible that the tracks aren’t lined up correctly. If they aren’t lined up right, then the bolts on the brackets of the tracks will come loose, causing them to break.

The lift cable broke

This is the more rare scenario, but sometimes the lift cable to your garage door can break, especially if it is older. If a lift cable breaks, all of the weight of the door will transfer to the lift cable on the opposite side. When you try to open it, it will only be able to pull on the one side, causing the rollers to come off the track.