Automatic garage doors offer a lot of advantages over manual garage doors. Unless you have some very particular reason to choose the manual option, you are almost certainly better off with automatic doors.

#Installation

The only real difficulty with an automatic garage door is the installation. But installation only needs to happen once, and you can mostly leave it to the professionals. Whether you are starting from scratch, or converting a manual door into an automatic garage door, installation will take very little of your time and money.

Naturally, if you decide to go it alone and install garage doors by yourself, things will take a little more time. For most people, I wouldn't advise trying to install automatic garage doors by yourself. It is possible, but what is a quick job for the experts will take amateurs many days of work. The sheer size of the garage door makes the installation tricky, and you could easily end up spraining your muscles as you try to manhandle an automatic garage door into place.

#Maintenance

Automatic garage doors do require slightly more maintenance than manual garage doors, but this need not be much of a burden, and a good automatic garage door is a sturdy beast, on the whole. The appropriate techniques will vary between different doors, so be sure to ask about maintenance when your automatic garage door is being installed.

Automatic garage doors should be resistant to most weather damage, and to water damage, but in some cases non-water chemicals within rain will cause a little corrosion to metal doors. This problem can be avoided by very occasionally wiping down your automatic garage door. Use water with a little soap in it to achieve the best effects. Different treatment will be required for automatic garage doors made of wood. The ideal method will depend on whether your doors are wood or wood-effect, and what type of wood they are. It is advisable to check the manufacturer's instructions when you buy the doors.

It is quite important to keep your automatic garage doors well-lubricated. This will increase their working life, and it will also make the doors operate more quickly and with less noise.

Good maintenance of your automatic doors is crucial to keeping them operating safely. Springs and balancing are particularly important in this. A door which is poorly balanced may fail to stop and reverse on contact with an object, which means it could injure somebody who fell in its path.

#Control

Remote control is one of the biggest selling points for automatic garage doors. The ability to come home and open your garage without even getting out of your car makes the commute home just that little bit more pleasant. It's certainly something you'll appreciate when the weather is foul, and you don't want to step out into the rain to wrestle with a cold door.

Remember that if you want to keep one remote control for your garage door permanently in your car, you will need another for operation at other times. Having a second remote control will make life much easier around the house, and can be a blessing if you lose the other control. It is also common to have a push-button control for the garage door as well, often on the inside of the garage. One way or another, somebody inside your garage should always be able to open your garage door.

Automatic garage doors typically have an additional manual locking/unlocking mechanism. This may not ever be used, but it is important for maintenance and safety reasons. In the event of a fire, for instance, you may need to use the garage door to escape your house. But electricity supply will likely be disrupted in such an eventuality, and so it is important that automatic doors have a 'failsafe' mode of manual operation.

#Aesthetics

Now here's something you can take out of the equation entirely: the aesthetics. Automatic garage doors don't have to look any different from manual garage doors, and in most cases there is no reason for them to. For some reason, the marketing types who try to sell you automatic garage doors seem to think you'll be seduced by the sight of gleaming metal sliding into operation. If that appeals to your aesthetic sense and the design of your house and garden, then by all means go for this kind of look, but don't let yourself be shoehorned into it, and certainly don't think it's the only option.

Many owners of automatic garage doors are proud of the way that they don't look automatic. Just like in murder mysteries, where the ornate bookcase conceals the hidden door, so old-fashioned wood or wood-effect doors can be automated in much the same way as metal ones. Automatic doors don't need to look modern to be modern.