The garage (i.e. the man cave). What a wonderful place to store all of the toys that the boss lady won’t let me store in the house. A question came up in discussion the other day, while a wonderful place the garage is, is the garage door the Achilles heel of the house?
Today’s discussion is not about weatherproofing the garage door against hurricanes (garage door failure is the #1 cause of structural failure during a hurricane, see this). Today’s discussion is how to secure this manly paradise for little to no cost.
If you have a garage door opener, like 90% of homeowners, there are two ways to secure your door against would be thieves:
- Use a lever to lock the garage door in place. This is great while on an extended vacation; but what about during the normal workday?
- A common way for thieves to break in through the garage is to trip the emergency release latch on a garage door opener. Once the release is tripped, the thief can simply open the door with ease and voila…he’s in. A very cost effective way to stop this kind of entry is to place a small zip tie through a hole above the opener and either around the latch, or through the cord hole. This will stop a potential thief, while still allowing you to open your door in an emergency.
You want to use a small zip tie or two instead of the thicker ones in case you have to use the emergency latch. Pulling on the latch with a bit more pressure will break a small zip tie, but yet the would be thief will not have enough torque to break the zip tie.
Simple…and effective.
Stay safe.
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