There are, broadly speaking, 4 types of garage door, the up and over, side hinged, sectional, and roller door. Each type of door has their place in different situations, but it could be argued that the best type is the roller door. This is because the main goal of a roller door is to limit the amount of space that the door uses, and it accomplishes this very effectively. In the pursuit of the this, the door also doesn’t really sacrifice anything in terms of the security and reliability of the door, although the cost can sometimes be higher than alternatives. The door also has fewer options for further development, although there are some valuable additional features that you might be interested in. Garage rollers are arguably the easiest variety of door to increase in scale, and are often considered the most well suited variety of door for those interested in installing a double width door on their large garage.
The roller doors are a highly engineered product that are made from numerous components. While there are variations in what components are used in which garage rollers, at their base they share a few key components. The first of these is the curtain, or what you might view as the main body of the door. The curtain is made of multiple slats that are long and thin. Although there are no set size requirements for the size of these slats, usually they span the entire aperture they’re filling, and they have a width of eight to fifteen centimetres. These slats are interlocked together in order to create a contiguous body that is referred to as a curtain. The slats can be orientated vertically or horizontally, however the more common option is a horizontal orientation in order to accommodate the upwardly opening garage roller door models that are far more common.
The second main component of a roller door is the frame. The frame is installed around the edges of the aperture that the door will come to span, and it is used in order to keep the roller door in place. It does this through the inclusion of guides that are put in place on both sides of the door, which contain the slats so that they can only move about on one plane. The guides can either be a simple gap in between the frame to accommodate the curtain, or it can be that but with additional bearings so that friction is reduced. The guide allows the curtain to be drawn upwards while preventing the door from moving backwards and forwards, and is also part of what makes the door more secure. Also, because the curtain is retained in the guide, it means that the door never projects outwards onto the driveway of your property, allowing you to fully use your drive for parking vehicles.
Lastly, you have a roller assembly system used in garage roller doors.. This is a part of the garage roller that is placed at the top for a upwardly opening door or at the side for a sidewards opening door. The roller assembly operates in much the same way as a rolling pin, in that the rotation of the roller assembly pulls the curtain of the garage roller upwards and around the roller assembly. By doing this, the body of the door is kept contained in a comparatively small space, allowing you to maintain the headspace available in the rest of your garage that you would otherwise have to sacrifice with other door varieties. When a garage roller door is upgraded into an electrical automatically operated door, an electric motor is placed on one end of the roller assembly, driving the rotation that is required to draw the curtain upward, thereby opening the door for you.
When it comes to actually operating a garage roller door, the process is relatively simple. The manual opening of the door requires that you grab an outside handle and pull it up. The top of the curtain is connected to a spring mechanism, which takes out the majority of the weight of the door and makes the strength required minimal. With the automatic opening provided with the various electric motorised garage rollers, you can use a remote control box that can be mounted inside of a vehicle or elsewhere in order to open the door at the push of a button remotely too.