Your Kids Walk Under It Every Day. Get It Ready for Winter.

Cold's coming. There's talk going around about a big winter this year, and if it shows up, good — we could use the water.

Either way, the door is the one to look at. It is the biggest machine in your house and the one you think about the least, because it works, and it keeps on working right up until the morning it doesn't, and that morning is cold and you're already late.

Half an hour of your time now saves you a whole lot in January. Here's what to spend it on.

Start with the bottom seal

Crouch down and look at the very bottom of your door. That black strip is the only part of the whole system that touches the ground, and it's doing more work this winter than anything else out there.

It keeps the cold out of the garage, which you'll feel in the house if a bedroom shares a wall with it. It keeps the mice and the packrats from walking in under a closed door on a freezing night, and they'll take a quarter-inch gap. They're out there right now looking for one.

Then there's the part that gets expensive. Water runs under the door, the temperature drops overnight, and that strip freezes onto the slab. You hit the button in the morning, the opener pulls from the top, and the bottom stays put. Something gives, and it is never the frozen end. It's the top panel. A cheap seal just turned into a panel job.

It's a rubber strip. Nobody's excited about a rubber strip. But it only does its job if it's meeting the floor across the whole width of the opening, and hardly any slab out here is level, so we carry a thick EPDM rubber in several widths. It's the same stuff they put on flat roofs. An uneven slab still gets sealed corner to corner instead of only in the middle.

The spring over everybody's heads

Look up. There's a bar running across the wall above the opening, and on it is a spring that carries the weight of the door so the opener doesn't have to. It is wound tight enough to seriously injure a grown adult, and it sits right over the patch of driveway where everybody stands waiting on the door to finish going up.

Cold is hard on it. Steel shrinks as the temperature drops and the film of oil on it goes thick and slow, so the first really cold morning of the year is harder on that spring than any morning in July ever was. We're busy that first real week of winter.

So here it is plainly, because these two halves get mixed up constantly: oil it, never adjust it.

A light coat of a good oil lubricant on that steel, once a year and ideally before the first freeze, is real maintenance, it works, and it's yours to do. Take your time and keep your footing.

What is never yours is the tension. No winding, no unwinding, no set screws, no quarter turn because a video said so. That tension is what injures people, and it belongs to somebody with the bars and the training. It's part of what a Kraftsman does on a tune-up.

Oil won't fix an old spring. If yours already has some years on it, it may be time to put a new one up now, in a jacket, instead of in January in the dark.

The morning the power is out

Storms take the power down out here. No back-up battery and the door turns into something you lift by hand, and it's dark and cold and everybody is already buckled into the car waiting on you.

Every opener we put in offers a back-up battery, and at this point most people take it. Nobody wants to start the day stuck in their own house.

Sixty seconds tonight

Here's one thing worth doing this week, and it's free.

Tonight, with the door shut, stand inside the garage and turn the light off. Give your eyes a second. Then look along the bottom edge of the door.

If a line of light shows up, from the street or a porch light or anywhere, your seal isn't reaching the floor. That line is the cold coming in. It's the same gap the critters use, and it's where water pools and turns to ice and locks the door to the slab the first night it drops below freezing.

That's the whole test. Nothing moves, nothing gets opened, and you'll know in a minute whether you're ahead of this or behind it.

The easier way to handle all of it

None of these three is expensive in October and every one of them is expensive in January, and what decides which one you get is usually just whether anybody looked.

That's what the Golden Key Klub is for. It isn't a coupon book. The upkeep happens on a schedule instead of in the middle of an emergency, and the Kraftsman who pulls into your driveway already knows your door.

One payment covers the year. You get the Kooler Cares tune-up, which is a full 24-point inspection and service covering balance, hardware, rollers, opener, sensors and lube. You also get priority scheduling, no trip or diagnostic fee, member pricing on repairs, front-of-line response when something quits and you need somebody now, and a K Kap safety check on every visit. Stay into a second year and it opens with a fresh set of rollers, or your bottom rubber replaced.

The full list is on the Golden Key Klub page.

Before it gets here

If a line of light showed up under your door tonight, or if the door has started making a noise it wasn't making in August, call or text 970-660-3456. We're all over the Grand Valley and Montrose, and we'd much rather meet you now than in a snowstorm.

Bring on the snow. Let's just get the door squared away first.

We Got You.

Behind The Door is the letter Kooler sends out every week, and a piece like this one goes in it. Get it in your inbox.