2 tips for wheelchair users who need to choose a door for their newly-built garage

21 May 2019
 Categories: , Blog


If you use a wheelchair and you need to select a door for your newly-built garage, you may find the advice below to be quite useful.

1. Opt for an electric garage door

Whilst manual garage doors are perfectly adequate for many people, they're not necessarily ideal for those who use wheelchairs. In your circumstances, an electric garage door that can be opened and shut remotely by using a handheld device might be more suitable. The reason for this is as follows; manually opening a heavy garage door whilst sitting in a wheelchair can be difficult. The process of grabbing hold of the base of a roller garage door and pushing it upwards, for example, could place a lot of strain on your upper body. Additionally, it could potentially lead to your wheelchair tipping over and you then being hurt (as you would have to lean forward to grasp the base of the door, which could affect your chair's balance).

Similarly, opening an 'up and over' garage door could be equally strenuous and complicated, as you may find it hard to reverse your wheelchair quickly as you pull the door up and it begins to swing towards you. This could result in you being struck in the face or body by the door's edge as it moves upward. Given this, an electric garage door is probably the best choice in this situation. This will allow you to open and shut the door whilst sitting at a safe distance away from it, which will, in turn, ensure that this process does not lead to you being injured or your wheelchair being damaged.

2. Adjust the speed on the door's remote to the slowest setting

On a lot of the handheld remotes that come with electric garage doors, there is a button that allows the speed with which the door moves to be changed. If your garage door remote comes with this feature, you should adjust it to the slowest setting.

The reason for this is as follows; if you accidentally position your wheelchair too close to the door after using the remote to open it, and the remote is set to the highest speed, the rapidly-moving door could collide with your wheelchair before you have a chance to get out of the way. You could then get knocked out of the chair.

Conversely, if the door were moving very slowly in this scenario, you would have plenty of time to realise that you're in the way and to roll your wheelchair to a safe spot. For more information, contact a company that works on garage doors.


Share