High Lift Garage Doors
We get requests from time to time to convert a garage door from standard lift to High Lift.
This conversion can increase head space in a garage to allow more storage area. Many times these requests come from people who want to install a vehicle lift in their garage to allow them to store multiple cars or to allow them to raise a car to work on it.
The rule of thumb is 12 inches of clearance from the garage ceiling to the garage door when fully open. If your garage ceiling is 10 feet and your garage door is 16×7, then we can raise the garage door to a height of 9 feet. The way this works is a standard lift garage door is 12 inches, or 1 foot. To convert this we will add 1 foot of lift to the garage door for a total of 2 foot of lift.
This requires us to replace the track, drums, cables and springs to accommodate the extra lift. If an automatic garage door opener is going to be used, we will also have to install a wall mount or jackshaft type of garage door opener. These garage door openers mount on the side of the garage door and lift the door by attaching directly to the spring bar as opposed to having an overhead motor with a rail. To make all the proper calculations, we must have the following information:
- Height of garage ceiling from floor to ceiling
- Actual size of garage door (example 16×7)
- Amount of desired lift, must be maximum of floor to ceiling height minus 12 inches
- Weight of garage door
If an automatic garage door opener is going to be used, then an electrical plug must be installed within 6″ on the side the opener will be installed.
