Two trucks, one phone, since 2016
Ironleaf is a small garage door company in Sarasota. It is owner-run, which in practice means the person who prices your job is the person standing under the door when it is done, and there is nobody in the middle with a target to hit.
91 Ironleaf Way, Sarasota, FL 34236
A yard and a workshop bench, not a showroom. If you want to see a door, we bring the section to you.
Why the ticket looks like that
The refused line on our sample ticket is not a marketing idea. It comes from the most common request in this trade, which is some version of “can you just make it stop doing that.”
A garage door that reverses off the floor, or stops halfway and goes back up, is maddening to live with. There is a screw on the side of most openers marked down force, and turning it makes the problem go away in about four seconds. It is the easiest sale in the business: the customer is delighted, the tech is out in fifteen minutes, and the money is the same as a diagnostic.
It is also the wrong thing to do, every time. The reversal is the opener refusing to crush something. Once the force is wound up, the door no longer stops for a bent track, a seized roller, a bicycle, a dog or a child — it pushes through all of them with the same enthusiasm. The fault that caused the reversal is still there; it has simply been given permission.
So we write it down. When somebody asks, the refusal goes on the ticket at $0.00, with the reason, and next to it goes the line for whatever was actually causing the bind. It means the customer has, in their hand, a piece of paper explaining why they did not get the thing they asked for. Nobody has ever been angry about it once they had read it.
How we work
Two trucks, and that is deliberate
Two trucks is roughly as big as this can get before somebody has to start supervising instead of working. We have turned down the growth on purpose. It means we sometimes cannot come today, and when that happens we say so rather than booking you into a slot we know we will miss.
Both trucks carry springs
Common wire sizes and lengths for residential doors ride on the truck, along with cables, drums, rollers, hinges, bottom brackets, opener gear kits and safety eyes. Most repairs finish on the first visit. Odd springs — very wide doors, very heavy wood doors, a few commercial sizes — are a next-day part, and you will be told that on the phone rather than discovered at your house.
High-cycle by default
Unless you tell us otherwise, a replacement torsion spring on a residential door goes in at 25,000 cycles rather than the 10,000-cycle part that came out. It is a modest amount more and roughly doubles the honest life of the part. If you would rather have the cheaper spring — you are selling the house, or the door is on its last legs anyway — say so, and that is what goes in.
We show you the broken part
Every time. A broken spring has a clean break and a paint line that tells you whether it was ever re-wound. A frayed cable has a bird-caged strand you can see from six feet. You should never have to take our word for it.
A new opener when the door is out of balance. A new door when three hinges and ten rollers would do it. A second spring on a door that never needed one. A “lifetime” anything, because springs are a wear part and calling them anything else is a word game.
A star rating we made up. A number of doors serviced. A photograph of somebody else's job with our name under it. An award nobody gave us. The drawing on this page is a drawing, and it says so.
On a real version of this site, this panel would carry the license number and the insurer, because those are checkable. On a demonstration site it would be a fabrication, so it is deliberately left as this sentence instead.