And what should I get for my garage door?

There are basically 4 different types of rollers that are used on garage doors. All rollers are made with steel stems with wheels at one end of roller. The difference is in the wheel itself. You have either plastic, steel or nylon covered wheels. Plastic wheels are fitted at one end of roller stem and do not use ball bearings in their construction. Steel wheels come 2 ways, with ball bearings and without ball bearings. The nylon-constructed wheels are pretty much identical to a skateboard wheel or roller blade wheel. They are also made of the same nylon material and always have a ball bearing system built in. If your rollers are constructed with ball bearings than they will be visible and need lubrication at least once a year.

       The rollers that do not use ball bearings will deteriorate a lot faster than ones with bearings. If they are plastic than the wheels will tend to break apart when they age over the years and the plastic rolling in a steel track system will wear the plastic down and over time the wheel gets smaller and tend to pop out of the track and cause other problems with door functionality. Of course the steel rollers will not have this kind of wear. Rollers with steel wheels and no bearings built in will over time come appart from roller stem and is noticeable when the wheel looks crooked when the door is in the up position.

       In my experience the nylon wheels with ball bearings are the best to use because of 2 reasons. First reason is the ball bearings give the roller more life and the poly wheel rolls in the steel track very quietly so in my opinion its a win-win choice. Customers are always happy with a quieter door. The Nylon ball bearing rollers and the solid steel rollers with ball bearings will give you about 5000 more cycles than the plastic non bearing rollers. (Cycle = open and close door one time each.) The plastic rollers with no ball bearings will give you about 10,000 cycles. These plastic rollers come standard on a lot of manufactures hardware boxes so ask door company if they offer ball bearing rollers as an upgrade. And some door manufactures use the better ball bearing with nylon thread standard in their hardware boxes. Mostly all garage door companies use or have these nylon rollers in their service trucks so you shouldn’t have a problem finding them. If you can find them at Home Depot or Lowes they are sold individually. So if you want to replace your old rollers yourself you will need 10-12 depending on the size of your door. Just count the rollers you have already to get an exact count.