How To Keep A Porch Door Open

I've noticed, looking at the Google Analytics of JustJoeP blog, that the "How To" postings seem to get more hits than everything else.  So there's going to be more of them, in the hope that I can help to provide people with useful recommendations and methods that can help them as much as I've found them to be useful as well.  As always, these are just my opinions, and they are free.  If you hurt yourself, or misinterpret, or do something wrong, or damage your or someone else's property, or whatever, then you have no recourse here to try and file a suit against me, Google blogger, or anyone else mentioned or associated with JustJoeP. 

One very common problem in the Arizona desert, is that the seals on hydraulic door closers tend to dry out rapidly, and the doors do not remain OPEN when you want them to.  A very simple solution to this, is something that the Hispanic delivery men who brought our couch showed me when brought our couch into the house.  You take coins... pennies, or dimes, or nickles, and you group them together, as shown in the picture below.  I taped 2 pennies together, to make them harder to lose, but you can use loose change too.

The coins change the angle of the angled metal stopper, and help it to "grab" the piston of the hydraulic door closer more effectively.  With the very heavy security doors that are common in Arizona, this adjustment is necessary if you want to keep the door open.  You can go up to 4 coins (penny or so thicknesses), and it is even more effective.   Below, you can see 2 sets of 2 pennies (4 coins) taped together, keeping the door opened.

I leave the pennies on the support practice that attaches the end of the piston to the door jamb, when I am not using them.  Keeps them handy, for the next time they're needed.

Yes, you can use a rock, or something really heavy to prop the door open, but in Arizona you can never be sure exactly what might be under that rock when you pick it up (black widows, scorpions, other possible creatures) and then you're relying upon the friction of the heavy object on your relatively smooth porch sidewalk surface to resist the door's weight from swinging the door closed.  A rock is a heavy, clumsy, brute force solution that lacks the precision and elegance of the 2, 3, or 4 penny piston spacer.