A sliding garage door is not the cheapest garage access option available, but it is certainly one of the best, most reliable and easiest of systems to operate.
The “extra expense” incurred in buying this kind of door comes from the need to have tracks and runners at both the top and the bottom of the opening and to have a strong and sturdy door construction. These tracks can extend to any distance enabling the opened garage door to be stored in a position where it will not cause an obstruction. The only special requirements for the fitting of this kind of door are a true and level base which can be prepared prior to the fitting of the tracks.
Once this is done, the end result is a mechanism that allows a door to be fully or partially opened without interfering with the space in front of or behind the door's threshold. This style of garage door offers an opening and closing action that is smooth, requires a minimum of physical effort to operate, and can easily and cheaply be motorised and remotely controlled.
More advantages
The running tracks that hold and control the motion of the door make the closed door very secure and ensure that sliding garage openers are amongst the strongest and most impenetrable systems around. They can also be locked in a number of different ways and offer high resistance to wind and impact damage.
A unique advantage to the horizontal sliding motion of these doors is the fact that the tracks can be fitted on either the inside or the outside of the structure. This is a fitting option that is not available on other door types. The smartest method is to install the tracks within the garage, however it can be easier and just as secure to have the tracks fitted in front of, and on the external face of, the garage building.
Given that sliding garage doors are continually supported at both their foot and head, they can be considerably larger than most other door types. This means that they are ideal for unusually large openings, as can be seen from their many commercial applications.
Sliding garage doors can be sectional in construction with vertical hinges enabling the composite door panels to hinge and bend around corners and returns. This means that they can slide on extended tracks that can take the door away from the threshold and store it against one of the garage's side walls at 90 degrees to the garage's opening.
This sectional door-panel construction also makes for easy size selection as most of the manufacturers of these sectional panels can simply add or remove individual panels to increase or decrease the size of the door.
As was pointed out at the introduction of this article, sliding garage doors are certainly not as cheap as some of the other door mechanisms like the up-and-over and side hinged options, but they do offer a superior operating system and greater ease of use. Additionally, they are very strong, they lend themselves to remote control operation and they can be opened and closed even when there are obstructions immediately in front of or behind the opening.
