Keeping the Overhead Door on a Hog or Dairy Barn Working

Out past Anna, Botkins and Fort Loramie, and on toward the Mercer and Auglaize county lines, a lot of the farm buildings are closed barns with fans in the end wall and hogs or dairy cows inside. Most of them have an overhead door somewhere, for the skid steer, the feed cart or loading out. On plenty of farms that door rusts out years ahead of the shop door across the yard, even though the two were hung the same summer.

Does a hog or dairy barn need a different overhead door than the farm shop beside it?

Usually the same kind of door, in very different air. Manure gives off gases, ammonia above all, and a barn full of animals closed up for winter is also full of the moisture they breathe out. That damp settles on the coldest steel in the building, which is the door and its hardware. In a fan-ventilated barn the door also has a second job, as part of the air system. Both jobs fall under commercial and ag door repair around Sidney.

The shop beside it has dry air and a door that only has to open and close. The barn door sits in damp, ammonia-laden air around the clock and wears from the hardware outward.

Why does a gap around the barn door matter to the fans?

A fan-ventilated barn runs under slight negative pressure. The exhaust fans pull air out, and fresh air is meant to come back in through the inlets, where the system can aim and spread it. Any gap in the building is an unplanned inlet. Air that leaks in around a door comes in where nobody planned for it, drops the barn’s static pressure, and leaves the pens nearest the leak sitting in a draft.

South Dakota State University Extension’s guide to air infiltration in swine barns makes the same point for winter, when cold air leaking through the cracks and doors of a barn reaches certain pens and the barn heater runs longer to make up for it.

The overhead door is one of the biggest openings in the wall, so a small fault there makes a long gap.

It might be a door that has sagged on its hinges or rollers and no longer sits tight against the jamb seal down one side. A bottom seal torn at one end. A door that no longer comes all the way down because something in the track or the operator limit has shifted. And the January one, a bottom seal that froze down to the concrete overnight and split when the door went up in the morning.

Fans, inlets and the controller belong to your ventilation contractor. The door’s part is the seal around its edges and a door that closes all the way, every time.

What does barn air do to garage door springs, cables and rollers?

Barn air corrodes them from inside the building, wherever the damp reaches. A shop door rusts where rain and snowmelt reach it, along the bottom. A barn door rusts everywhere the damp air touches bare or thinly coated steel, and inside a closed barn that is all of it: the spring coils, the cable where it loops around the bottom bracket, the drums and bearing plates up on the shaft, the roller bearings and stems, and the hinge pins.

Most of it happens out of reach, but a few signs show from the floor:

• Orange dust or flakes on the floor or the door top, right under the spring.
• A lift cable whose loop at the bottom bracket looks frayed, swollen or rust-brown.
• A roller that drags or slides in the track instead of turning.
• A door that has started to go up uneven, one side ahead of the other.

A door with a frayed cable or a gap in a spring coil stays down and is not run, and getting it working again is the technician’s job. A barn door that opens a few times a day dies of the air long before it uses up its spring cycles, which is the opposite of how cycles wear out a busy shop door’s springs. If the cable is the part you are looking at, our page on what a frayed or broken garage door cable looks like covers how to tell it from a spring problem.

What does washing the barn out between groups do to the door?

Washdown puts liquid water on the parts the barn air only dampens. Spray soaks the roller and shaft bearings, works under the bottom seal, coats the photo eyes and drives water into the opener head. Near the door, wash past the opener and the eyes rather than straight at them, and once the barn has dried out, run the door up and down once so the bearings and the bottom seal move before the next group comes in.

Is there garage door hardware made for a barn?

Yes, part by part, without replacing the door. The steel parts that corrode on a standard door come in versions made for wet and corrosive rooms. Lift cables come galvanized or in stainless. Torsion springs come galvanized or with a protective coating in place of bare oil-tempered wire. Rollers come with nylon wheels and sealed bearings, or in stainless with sealed bearings, and hinges and fasteners come in stainless or galvanized steel too.

At the bottom of the door, the steel retainer that holds the bottom seal can be swapped for an aluminum or vinyl one, which leaves nothing there to rust under the seal. And the opener can be one built for washdown rooms, with gasketed enclosures and a washdown-duty motor, or, where that is not in the cards, mounted where the barn air and the spray reach it least.

The practical rule is to put the failed part back in its corrosion-resistant version on the same visit. A barn door that gets galvanized or stainless cable and sealed rollers at the repair has less bare steel left for the air to work on.

When is the best time to fix the door on a livestock barn?

When the barn is empty, if it ever is. A hog barn run all-in, all-out stands empty between groups while it is washed and dried, and that window is the time for planned work on the hardware and the seals. A dairy barn is never empty, so planned work on a dairy door gets fitted around milking and feeding, with the door closed again before the cows need the alley.

Worn rollers and a rusty cable are planned-work problems if somebody catches them in October. A door that will not close on a January night with animals inside leaves the barn unable to hold its heat or its air, and that is the same-day call emergency garage door repair is for.

Sound like your situation? The service page covers the doors we work on and how a visit fits your hours: Commercial and ag door repair around Sidney.