#Safety features

When you're installing any machinery in your home, you need to take care over safety. This is a good reason to avoid 'fly by night' operators who will install automatic garage doors without taking proper concern over safety. You need to find reliable workmen to install automatic doors in Perth without any risk of fire or damage.

The Government of the United States has a 'consumer product safety committee', which is responsible for investigating the safety of common consumer goods. They calculate that some 60 children have been killed by automatic garage doors in the past two decades, a rate of four per year.

Many automatic garage doors will be designed so as to stop moving if they are resisted. This feature helps to prevent damage to property - for instance if you park your car too close to your automatic garage door, you need the doors to stop before they put a scratch on your bonnet. It also prevents damage to the door mechanism itself - if it hits an immovable object it will stop, rather than grinding away until it wears out its motor. But most importantly, this feature means that if somebody somehow becomes trapped behind your automatic garage door, they run no risk of being hurt. This is therefore a legal requirement in some areas: automatic garage doors in Perth must automatically stop and reverse if they hit an object in their path.

#Garage doors and your children

Much of what's above in the 'safety features' section applies doubly if you have children, and triply if they're young children. Automatic garage doors aren't inherently dangerous - certainly not compared to a lot of other objects you'll find around your home - but it is nonetheless important to minimise what risks there are. In general, I would advise most families with children to choose an automatic garage door over a manual garage door.

Mostly, this will be a matter of simple common sense. You'll want to explain to your children that they should keep clear of the doors, and especially not get trapped behind them at a bad moment. It's a good idea not to leave your garage door in a partially-open position, but only either fully open or fully closed. Leaving an automatic garage door partially open can tempt children to crawl under it. When they are thus trapped underneath, they can be injured by the garage door closing. Ensure that you don't leave your automatic garage doors in this position, and you should not have any problems.

And don't forget that the automatic garage door has a lot to offer a family with children. When you are trying to carry your toddler, her food, her toys, and all the other awkwardly-shaped possessions that children accumulate, you're not in a position to easily open manual garage doors. Simplify the process to just pressing a button, and you can do it with the last finger that you have spare.

As your children get older, they'll be able to operate automatic garage doors themselves.

#The interference problem

A rare problem to watch out for with automatic doors using remote controls is that of interference. It is possible that neighbours nearby with similar doors will cause interference, leading to intermittent problems opening your door. The same problem can occur even if there aren't other doors nearby, since various other devices may use the same radio frequency as automatic garage doors (the 390-megahertz band). The most notable case of this was in Ottawa, Canada in 2005, when many automatic garage doors were disrupted by a strange radio signal.

#Aesthetics

Then you'll need to consider what your garage door will look like. It's easy to over-estimate the importance of this element. Yes, it matters what your garage door looks like - of course it does, since they're often on display to your entire street. But most of the time, the choice between manual and automatic garage doors will have only a limited bearing on what visual options are open to you.