February 2, 2026 · 6 min read
Montreal winters are hard on garage doors. Here's what to check before the cold sets in, and what to leave to a technician.
If you’ve owned a house in Montreal for more than one winter, you already know what freeze-thaw cycles, road salt, and -25°C mornings do to anything mechanical. Your garage door is no exception. It’s the largest moving object in your house, it’s mounted on metal tracks exposed to outdoor temperature swings, and it gets used more in winter than any other season because it’s the door everyone actually uses.
Most of the emergency calls we get in January and February trace back to a handful of predictable causes. None of them require a big renovation. They require attention before the cold hits, not after the door is already stuck.
Metal contracts in the cold. Torsion springs (the heavy coiled springs above the door that do the actual lifting) lose a small amount of tension as the temperature drops. A door that closed and opened smoothly in October can feel noticeably heavier in January, even with nothing broken. That’s normal. What’s not normal is a door that won’t move at all, or one that slams down instead of lowering evenly. Those are signs something has already given out, not just tightened up from the cold.
It’s not really the cold that wrecks garage door hardware: it’s what your car tracks in with it. Road salt and slush drip onto the floor track and get flung up onto the rollers, hinges, and the bottom of the tracks every time you pull in. Salt corrodes metal and eats through lubricant fast. Over a season, that corrosion is what makes rollers grind, hinges seize, and tracks bind. A garage that stays a few degrees above freezing doesn’t help: that mix of damp and salt is worse than dry cold.
Wipe down the tracks and the bottom of the door with a dry cloth when you notice salt buildup: that’s genuinely useful and low-risk. Keep the weatherstripping along the bottom of the door clear of ice and debris so it can seal properly; a torn or frozen strip lets cold air, and eventually water, into the garage. Test your door’s auto-reverse safety feature monthly by placing a piece of wood on the ground where the door closes: it should reverse on contact. If it doesn’t, stop using the door and call a technician; that’s a safety system, not a convenience feature.
What we don’t recommend is homeowners lubricating springs, adjusting track alignment, or trying to “loosen up” a door that’s moving stiffly. What feels like a lubrication problem is often a spring that’s already fatigued from a season of cold-weather cycling, and a spring under tension is not something to guess at.
If your garage floor slopes toward the door, or if snow gets tracked in and melts overnight, you can end up with a thin sheet of ice welding the bottom of the door to the floor. Never force a door that’s frozen to the ground: that stress goes straight into the opener motor, the springs, or the bottom bracket, and any one of those can fail under the strain. Clear visible ice with warm water or a plastic scraper, never a metal tool that can gouge the seal, and give it time to melt before running the opener.
If your door has gotten noticeably heavier, louder, or less even over the course of a Montreal winter, that’s worth a look before it fails completely, usually on the coldest morning of the year, at the worst possible time. A technician can check spring tension, roller condition, and track alignment in one visit and tell you honestly whether you’re looking at a minor adjustment or a part that’s near the end of its life.
If your garage door is sticking, slow, noisy, or frozen shut this winter, call ASAP Garage Door at 514-701-8612. We’ll take a look, tell you straight what’s going on, and the $30 service call is waived if you go ahead with the repair.
$30 Service Call, Waived: a technician gives you a firm price before any work starts.
Call 514-701-8612