Are you a night owl suffering from keeping your family awake at 3 a.m. due to squeaky door hinges? Or maybe you’re the family members sick of being woken up? There’s a lot of debate as to how to lubricate door hinges, but few quick answers.
Here are our favorite ways to lubricate door hinges quickly and easily. Shorten your home maintenance list with these tools and instructions today.
How to Lubricate Door Hinges
The quickest and easiest way to lubricate door hinges is to apply lubricant directly to the hinges in question. It can be hard to identify which hinge is causing noise as most doors have at least 3 different hinges.
Therefore, it’s important to have enough lubricant on-hand to apply to more than one hinge. Typically this means a store-bought lubricant is a better investment than raiding the kitchen.
Here are a few options for door hinge lubricants.
1) Specific Hinge or WD-40 Spray
The most efficient way to solve a squeaky door is with door-specific lubricant. Of these, WD-40 is notorious for being a combination blend of many lubricants. The company behind WD-40 keeps the exact formula of their spray a secret but explains that the spray also has anti-corrosion agents.
To use WD-40 spray to lubricate your door, carefully remove the hinge pins from your door. Spray the hinges with the WD-40 before replacing the pins.
You can also simply spray the WD-40 without removing the door, but this may be less effective.
2) Food-Grade Oils
When in a 3 a.m. pinch, sometimes running to the store for some WD-40 is infeasible. Thankfully, food-grade oils such as olive or coconut oils can also help lubricate squeaky doors.
You can apply these to squeaky door hinges in a similar fashion to WD-40 and other lubricants. However, you may still want to grab a different lubricant later on. Food oils can collect dust and become dirty pretty quickly.
Wipe these off and replace them with hinge lubricant when possible.
3) Bar Soap
Not too excited about grabbing some food oil at night? Bar soap could work just as well! These often have oils within their composition. These oils, therefore, ease home maintenance of doors in a similar fashion.
While you may still want to later replace bar soap suds with a lubricant, this option should be less messy than food-grade oils.
Garage Door Lubrication
So now you know how to lubricate door hinges even, even at 3 a.m. But what about a garage door? If your garage door is halting or making a strange sound when in use, it might be in need of some love and care.
Lubricating garage door rollers doesn’t have to be difficult, and hiring a maintenance team can help you avoid any pitfalls. The type of lubricant you use will depend on the roller type in your garage.
While metal rollers will rely on garage door lubricants, nylon rollers may not need additional lubrication at all.
Lubricating Door Hinges for Home Maintenance
Learning how to lubricate door hinges will surely result in sounder sleep and less annoyance. It is also important to monitor your door hinges for noise to avoid rust and buildup over time.
Feeling equipped to stop your doors from squeaking and tackle more home maintenance tasks? Read more about real estate and upkeep on our blog today.