Provo, UT · Garage Door Service
Provo homes built mostly between 1975 and 2015 use seal styles that don't hold up to our cold winters. Here's when a draughty door can wait and when it can't.
Not every gap under a garage door is an emergency. If you've got a thin line of daylight along the bottom seal and the garage isn't heated or storing anything sensitive to cold, you can usually ride it out until spring. Most houses in this service area went up between 1975 and 2015, with the median build year around 1998, so the bottom seal on a lot of these doors is original or close to it. A seal that's just started to flatten on one side, rather than crack or tear, still keeps most wind and blown snow out. If the draft is coming from the sides or top of the panel instead of the bottom track, that's usually a bigger job than a seal swap, and rushing a fix in freezing weather often means redoing it once the ground thaws and the door settles back to its normal position. Waiting a season costs you a slightly higher heating bill in the attached rooms, not a failed door. Where it's not fine to wait: if the gap is wide enough to see daylight in a straight line, or if you can feel airflow strong enough to move a piece of paper, that seal is done and letting in more than cold air.
A large share of the garage doors around here are original to houses built in the 1980s and 90s, per local housing stock records covering the 23 named areas in this service territory. Those decades used seal profiles and track clearances that don't match what's sold off the shelf today. Homeowners in Springville, Lindon, Pleasant Grove, and the rest of the towns within about 15 miles of Provo run into the same mismatch: the door is old enough that the seal channel has worn wider than a new bulb seal, so a straight swap doesn't seat right. This isn't a defect, it's just what 30-40 year old aluminum track does. The climate here is classed as cold and severe, which matters because rubber and vinyl seals lose flexibility fast once temperatures drop, and a seal that already fits loose in October can pull away from the track entirely by January. That's the actual failure pattern we see: not the seal breaking, but the seal shrinking and pulling loose from a channel it was never a tight fit in to begin with.
Cold-severe winters do two things to garage door seals that milder climates don't. First, repeated freeze-thaw cycles work moisture into the seal channel and behind the bottom astragal, and when that moisture freezes it can push the seal out of its track overnight. Second, vinyl and rubber both stiffen as temperatures drop, so a seal that flexed fine in August can crack the first time it's compressed hard against a cold slab in December. On houses built in the 1975-2015 window, especially the older end of that range, the slab itself has usually shifted slightly over the decades, so the door isn't meeting a perfectly level surface anymore. That uneven contact point is where seals fail first, and it's why the same seal can look fine on one side of the door and be shredded on the other. None of this is unique to any one house. It's a function of age plus climate, and it means seal failure here tends to show up in patches along the bottom edge rather than as one clean tear across the whole width.
The most common mistake is buying a universal bottom seal sized for a modern track and forcing it into an older channel. It looks like it fits when you push it in by hand, then pulls loose within a few cold nights because the channel width doesn't match. The second mistake is treating a draft as purely a seal problem when the door itself has racked slightly out of square, which is common on original doors from the 1980s and 90s that have carried decades of freeze-thaw movement in the framing around them. A new seal on a door that isn't square will still leak. Here's the honest limit: if the bottom seal is your third replacement in a few years, the fix isn't another seal, it's the track alignment or the door itself, and we'll tell you that instead of selling you another seal that will fail the same way by next winter.
There's no fixed schedule since it depends on the seal material and how exposed the door is, but the cold-severe winters here mean seals stiffen and crack faster than they would in a milder climate. If you're checking once a year before winter, you'll catch most problems before they turn into a full draft.
A lot of houses in this area were built in the 1980s and 90s, and the track channels from that era are often wider than what current standard seals are sized for. A seal that looks like it snaps in can pull loose within weeks once cold weather stiffens the material.
It depends on the gap. A thin line of daylight along the bottom can usually wait until better weather. A gap wide enough to feel airflow, or one that's grown since you last checked, should get looked at before it widens further under freeze-thaw cycles.
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