Another home improvement product that is particularly desirable is the Automated Garage Doors. A lot of the home improvement companies around at the moment install these garage doors all the time. The great thing is that technology is improving and the price is falling.

Basically an automated or automatic electric garage door allows you to open and close the garage door without putting in any effort. More often than not the garage door is operated via a remote control. This has many advantages. If it happens to be raining you can press the button as you approach your driveway. One you have reached your driveway the garage door is almost open and ready for you to drive in. Not only a great convenience but also reassurance for vulnerable people worried about getting out of their car on a dark winters night.

Automatic garage doors come in many varieties. You can have typical up and over garage doors. These are the common type of door on most people’s properties. They are generally not automated. The more common automatic garage doors that you will find are a slatted roller door. This means that the garage door is made up with a number of slats or panels slid together. As the garage door rolls up the slats fold onto one another and roll onto a large axle at the top of the door.

These garage doors are particularly attractive as well as providing maximum security for your garage and property.

One point to consider before buying a roller garage door is the head room required to fix the box up that the door rolls into. This is generally about 30cm x 30cm (12 inches). If you do not have much room above the opening of your garage door then this box will have to come down into the opening and be visible from the outside. Whilst this doesn’t usually cause an issue, if you have a particularly low garage opening or a particularly tall car you may find it is impractical to have this type of garage door installed.

Having said the above these roller garage doors can be fitted in three main ways – usually one of these methods will get over the problem listed above. The first and most popular method is what is known as an internal fit. With this method the garage door guide channels are installed on the inside of your garage and the main box up above the opening (assuming you have space) this gives the most attractive look as only the garage door slats are visible from the outside. The only negative with this type of installation is that you may lose a few inches from the depth of your garage so bear this in mind if you have a long vehicle or are already tight on space.

The next Method commonly used for installing roller garage doors is a reveal fit. This is where the door actually sits in the reveal of the opening. The full width of the guide channels are visible and the full 30cm box is visible. Of course it is important to note that the door opening will be reduced by the size of the two guide in width, and, the height reduced by the box size.

The final popular method of roller garage door installations is an external fit. This is identical to the internal fit in every way except the whole thing it turned around and mounted on the outside of the building. This is handy if you do not have the head room for an internal fit. The only dislike I have on these types of installations is the fact that you see the reverse of the slat from the outside. This doesn’t make that much difference but it is slightly more curved to allow for the garage door to roll up.

Garage doors like this vary a lot in price from manufacturer to manufacturer. There are a lot of different options to consider such as, will you need a manual override in case of a power failure? Essential if your house fuse box is in the garage. Options such as battery backups, alarms and much more are available and this is something I will be discussing more in the near future.

So a ballpark figure from an automated roller garage door – I would put this at approximately £1500 however this can vary greatly depending which company you choose and which features you require. If you do rely heavily on your garage door then I would suggest to scrimping on quality here as a breakdown can be most inconvenient at the best of times.