What makes a garage door squeal or screech when it moves?

Find the noise before you treat it

Squealing tells you two surfaces are moving against each other without enough lubricant between them. The useful question is which two. Run the door halfway, stop it, and listen with your hand near each part as a helper cycles it: rollers at the track, hinges at the section joints, the spring on the header, the opener rail overhead. The noise almost always localizes within a cycle or two.

Dry rollers make a continuous squeal that tracks the door's motion. Dry hinges chirp in bursts as each section rounds the curve. A spring that has lost its coating gives a deeper screech from the header, usually with a faint grinding underneath — that is the one with teeth.

The twenty-minute fix for most doors

• Use garage door lubricant, not WD-40. A silicone or lithium spray made for doors clings and stays. Penetrating oil strips what is there and leaves the parts drier than it found them — the full explanation is in why WD-40 is the wrong product for garage door springs.
• Hit the roller stems, not the track. Lubricant belongs where the stem meets the bearing. Greasing the track itself just collects the red dust that gets into everything around here.
• Do every hinge pin. A short spray at each pin, then cycle the door twice to work it in.
• Coat the springs lightly. A thin film down the coils quiets them and slows rust. Our lubrication schedule covers how often this needs repeating in Oklahoma's swings.

When lubricant does not hold

If the squeal returns within a week or two, the parts are past lubricating. Steel rollers with worn bearings will scream again as soon as the oil migrates, and they are the single most common cause of a door that never stays quiet. Swapping to sealed nylon rollers is the usual cure and buys a noticeable drop in noise besides — we compare the two in nylon versus steel rollers.

Hinges that have elongated at the pin hole behave the same way. Once the hole is oval, the pin knocks and squeals no matter what you spray, and the hinge needs replacing.

The squeal that means stop

A screech from the spring area that arrives alongside a door which has gotten hard to lift by hand is a different animal. Springs do not squeal politely for long before they fail, and a failure while the door is moving is the scenario covered in what happens when a spring breaks mid-travel. If the door is also heavy, or one side sits higher than the other, park the car outside and call.

Short of that, most squeals are just a door asking for its twice-a-year service. If you would rather have it done alongside a full safety check, our maintenance visit covers the whole system.