I hate winter and I’m not the only one—your garage door hates the winter too. The colder it gets, the busier our service gets because the low temperatures wreak havoc on everything.

In the cold, metal gets rigid and fragile and, guess what, pretty much your entire garage door is metal. While the door itself isn’t going to break just because it’s cold, a lot of the smaller moving parts have a higher chance to break. Most of all, the large metal springs that raise and lower your door—stretching and compressing at least four times a day as most of us leave and return from work—are the primary things that we find breaking this time of year. Without those springs, you and your opener are stuck trying to lift the full weight of your heavy door and it goes about as well as you can expect.

My personal pet peeve is the cusp of temperatures that allow the snow to melt during the day and then refreeze at night. If your house is on a slope like mine, you might find that some water has slithered under your door and frozen the rubber seal at the bottom—called astragal—to the concrete. Again, we aren’t getting our doors open until we get rid of that nasty ice.

Our technicians are also getting more and more calls for noisy doors. Why? Because the lubricant and grease that help quiet your door are going to freeze or harden like anything else in the cold. Batteries are also dying much faster this time of year, especially the ones that are outside in our cars or in the keypad mounted outside our doors. Save yourself a service call and pop some replacements into those puppies—we’re here at the showroom if you need help.

Human error is also a little higher in the cold. I don’t know about you, but once I’ve shoveled the driveway, I just want to get back in the warm house as soon as possible. We find that plenty of people accidentally block their infrareds—which are little safety features at the base of the garage door—with snow shovels and bags of salt. Snowflakes can also flutter inside and melt on the infrareds. The infrared eye ‘sees’ anything that may be in the path of the closing door, including these water droplets, so make sure they’re wiped off.

As if I needed any other reason to hate winter, I think I just gave you about six. However, we at A.B.E. Doors and Windows are here to make the cold a little less terrible.