Video: How to Adjust Your Patio Door

Patio doors are more than just an entryway to your home. They offer a stylish and comfortable way to expand your living space, add a lot of light, and bring in fresh air and sunlight without sacrificing your privacy.

Simply put, they’re awesome.

However, a drawback of their awesomeness is that they get open and closed billions (ok, maybe not billions) of times a year.

This wear-and-tear can cause some issues to occur with your patio doors over time. But here at Nordik, we want to give you a few tips on lubrification techniques and proper glass maintenance for any season, including adjustments for misalignments.

Check out this video of our own Service Tech, Sylvain, explaining how to adjust your patio door!

Hey I'm Sylvain and today I'm going to show you how to adjust and maintain the patio door.

So right now you can see that the patio door has too much play in it. It's a simple adjustment, just open it up right here above the latch there's an adjustment screw and if you rotate that you can see the hook raising, that'll give you a tighter seal nice and tight that's perfect and you want to have just a tiny bit of play for expansion and contraction especially in Canada because we have all four seasons, but you still want it to be tight so that you don't get any air infiltration.

Now, I'll show you how to correct the operating panel on a patio door if it's out of alignment with the frame.

You can see here at the bottom it's pretty tight, but as you go up you'll see that it's getting larger and larger towards the top, so the adjustment for that is to tighten the screw for the wheel which will lower or raise the the whole panel.

Depending if you're tightening or loosening, we can see the difference. This part on the on the patio door is called the foot bolt. It's so you can lock the door with your foot. The other is for when the door is slightly open to allow a breez in.

Now, we're going to show you how to adjust the screen. It's out of square with the door frame. As you can see, the bottom is quite large and, as you go up the gap, gets smaller and tighter. In order to adjust the screen, it's just like the main panel on the patio door. There's a wheel at the bottom which you raise in order to align it with the frame. Now we've raised it and now you can see just the screen is square in the frame.

So the next adjustment we're going to do on this patio door is to get rid of this slack. That's in the screen door. So you don't want to have this much play when you upwards. The adjustment is very simple. It's just like the other one. You just have to tighten up this screen wheel here.

All right! Now it's rigid inside the frame and it cannot go up or down. The next piece of information for this door is for maintenance in the winter time. You want to leave the screen open, especially if you have ice that might build up on the track. You don't want to operate the door if there's ice on the track because it could possibly come off and, in case of emergency, if the door is frozen in place you might have to force your way out whereas, if you leave it open, you'll always have an available exit.

OK! For the maintenance of the patio door I recommend spraying it with Jig-a-loo, which is a silicon-based lubricant in the spring and fall. So twice a year!

So the silicone gets applied on the track for the main patio door and also for the screen door. You can apply it liberally.

To maintain the glass, you should just use any type of glass cleaner that is ammonia-free. For example, Windex is actually made with ammonia so you shouldn't use Windex. You don't want to use ammonia because it'll actually dry out the PVC of your door or window.