Make Your Garage Door More Secure With A Simple Tool Hack

Did you know garage doors can be a weak point in your home security, especially if they aren't well-maintained? Any gaps in an old or warped garage door create opportunities for forced entry. One common break-in maneuver is to feed a wire clothes hanger through the seam along the top of the door to catch the emergency pull cord and pull it to the outside (windows, however small, can aid burglars with this trick by letting them see their handiwork). Not only that, but even an outdated garage door opener can make you more vulnerable to break-ins since the older technology can be much more easily hacked than modern alternatives.

Fortunately, you can fight back with your own clever use of everyday tools to make your garage door more secure. One hack is to use a single tool you might already have in your toolbox: Locking pliers, which you may know better by the brand name Vise-Grips. Vise-Grips come in a few different forms, but they all serve the same basic purpose: Locking onto something to hold it securely in place. Vice-Grips are used for a variety of garage door tasks, such as holding the garage door in place along the track. In the same way, you can use Vise-Grips to prevent burglars from opening the garage door. Simply clamp them tightly to the interior lip of the garage door's vertical rails — on one or both sides — to stop the rollers in the track.

There are a lot of smart ways to protect your garage doors from break-ins, and many of them utilize tools you already have. While Vise-Grips create a tight hold on the rails, it isn't a completely secure solution. The door could be leveraged to knock them off, especially if they don't have a perfect hold. Another idea is to use tools that can go completely through the rails, so no amount of leverage can remove them. C-clamps and padlocks are two good tools for the job; just feed them through an opening along the vertical rail and lock them in place.

Another simple tool hack to secure your garage? Put a zip tie on your garage door. If the garage door trolley (which the emergency pull cord hangs from) has small holes on the trolley base and the release lever, you can string a zip tie through them so the cord can't be pulled. If you need to use the emergency release, just cut the zip tie with scissors. Speaking of, you can also use scissors to make your garage door more secure by cutting off the plastic handle at the end of the emergency pull cord — burglars rely on it to catch their wire hooks to pull the cord to the outside. You can also cut the emergency cord so even if someone does try to access it from the outside, it won't be long enough to pull out and use, but you can still utilize it from inside when needed.