· by Michael Blair, Nashville's Garage Door
The garage door is the largest opening in most houses and usually the least considered. The common ways in do not involve force, and two of them exploit features that exist for good reasons. Understanding them makes the fixes obvious and mostly cheap.
The emergency release
Every opener has a red cord that disconnects the door from the carriage so it can be lifted by hand in a power cut. It hangs down from the rail and it is required, because a family trapped by a dead opener is the scenario it exists for.
It can be reached from outside on many doors by working a thin tool or a wire hook through the gap at the top of the door and hooking the cord. That is the single most common non-forced entry. A shield over the release, or a zip tie of the right strength that a real pull will break but a hooked wire will not, closes it without defeating the safety function.
Old openers and fixed codes
Openers made before the late 1990s used a fixed code set by dip switches, and there were only a limited number of combinations. A device that cycles through them opens any such door in a short time, and these openers are still in service on plenty of Nashville houses.
Anything modern uses a rolling code that changes with each use, which defeats that attack entirely. If your opener has dip switches inside the remote, it is old enough to replace, and the replacement is one of the cheaper security improvements available on a house.
- Shield or secure the emergency release cord
- Replace any opener with dip-switch remotes
- Never leave a remote clipped to a visor in a parked car
- Cover or frost the garage windows
- Fit a deadbolt on the door from the garage into the house
The door between the garage and the house
Once inside the garage, an intruder is out of sight of the street and has time and, frequently, your own tools. That interior door is often a hollow-core door with a passage knob, because it is treated as an interior door rather than an exterior one.
It should be treated as an exterior door: solid core, a deadbolt, and a strike plate with long screws into the framing rather than the jamb. It is also required to be fire rated and self-closing in most codes, which is a separate reason to look at it.
Habits that matter more than hardware
A remote clipped to the visor of a car parked in the driveway is a key to the house left in an unlocked box. Move it to a keychain remote or use the phone app most current openers support.
Leaving the door open while working in the yard is the other one, and it is the most common way a garage gets emptied in daylight in a quiet neighborhood. Most modern openers will close automatically after a set time or alert a phone when the door has been open too long, and both features are worth turning on.