The thirteen we answer most weeks

Almost never. Six inches and stop is the classic signature of two things, and neither is a dead opener. The first is the up-travel limit set wrong — the opener genuinely believes the door is open, so it stops. The second, more common on a door that used to work fine, is that the door is binding somewhere in the first few inches of travel and the opener is reversing or stalling off the resistance. That is the safety system doing its job.

The way to tell them apart takes a minute. Pull the release cord and lift the door by hand. If it comes up smoothly all the way, the door is fine and the fault is in the opener's limits. If it catches or goes heavy at the same point where the opener gave up, the door is the problem — usually a bent track, a seized roller or a bottom bracket that has moved.

Usually not. The noise almost always comes from three places: steel rollers with worn bearings, hinges that have elongated at the pin, and the opener's chain if it is loose.

A steel roller runs on a plain or ball bearing riding hard steel inside hard steel track, and every imperfection in either comes straight through the door into the room above. A nylon roller has the same bearing but a plastic wheel, so the contact between wheel and track is quiet and slightly forgiving. Ten of them and a set of hinges will transform most doors, and it is a fraction of the cost of anything else on our services page.

The exception is a bang or a sharp crack rather than a rumble. That is not wear. That is usually a spring, a cable or a section separating, and it is worth a look.

Stop using the door. What has almost certainly happened is that the cable came off its drum — often because the door was run down onto an obstruction, so the drum kept turning while that corner of the door stopped, and the wraps went slack and jumped the groove.

It is a straightforward job for someone with the right kit and a genuinely bad one to improvise. The door has to be clamped and supported, the spring tension has to be managed, and then both cables must be re-seated and set so the two drums are wrapped to the same mark. If they are not, the door will always come up crooked and it will chew through the track and the rollers on the low side.

Do not run the opener to try to straighten it. That usually pulls the other cable off too, or drags the top section over.

Lay a flat 1½-inch board on the floor under the middle of the opening. A standard two-by-four lying flat is about that, and a full roll of paper towels on its side is close enough for the purpose. Close the door with the opener. The moment the bottom seal meets the board, the door must stop and go back up.

Then do the second test. Start the door closing and wave a broom handle through the beam between the two photo-eyes near the floor. The door must reverse.

Do both once a month. If either fails, the opener should not be used until somebody has found out why, and the answer is never to increase the force setting. Openers made since 1993 are required to do both of these things.

A torsion spring is rated for a number of cycles, and one cycle is one full open and one full close. A standard residential spring is around 10,000 cycles. A high-cycle spring is 25,000 or more, achieved with thicker wire and a longer coil.

To turn that into years, count your own door. A household that opens it four times a day — out, back, out, back — uses about 1,500 cycles a year. So 10,000 cycles is around seven years and 25,000 is around sixteen. If you have teenagers, or the garage is the only door anybody uses, double your count and halve the answer.

We fit high-cycle by default because the price difference is small next to the difference in years, and we will fit a standard spring instead if you ask. Whichever goes in, the rating gets written on your ticket.

No. This is the one thing on this whole site we are absolutely rigid about.

A torsion spring holds the entire weight of the door as stored energy in wound steel. Releasing or applying that tension requires the correct winding bars — solid steel bars sized to the holes in the winding cone. Screwdrivers, rebar, socket extensions and long bolts all either bend or slip, and when one slips the cone unwinds through whatever is in front of it. This is the part of the trade that puts people in emergency rooms, and the injured party is very often somebody who was following instructions from a phone call or a video.

We would rather drive out. If we are booked up, we will say so and you can call somebody else — just make sure they own winding bars.

Torsion springs sit on a steel shaft above the opening and wind up as the door comes down. Extension springs run along the horizontal tracks on each side, stretching as the door closes.

Torsion is the better system on almost every count: the load is applied centrally so the door travels straighter, the hardware lasts longer, and a broken spring stays where it is on the shaft.

Extension springs are cheaper and still common on older and lighter doors. The thing that matters about them is containment. An extension spring must have a containment cable — a plain steel cable run down the middle of the spring and anchored at both ends. Without one, a spring that breaks under tension leaves at speed and travels the length of the garage. With one, the pieces stay threaded on the wire. It is a cheap part. If you have extension springs, go and look now; you can see whether the cable is there from the doorway.

That is range, not a failing remote, and range problems are usually interference or a compromised antenna rather than the handset. The wire hanging down from the back of the opener head is the aerial: it should hang straight down, uncut and untucked. People bundle it up with a zip tie because it looks untidy, and lose half their range.

The other common cause is an LED bulb in the opener. Cheap LED lamps throw radio noise right next to the receiver. Swapping to an incandescent rough-service bulb, or an LED specifically sold for garage door openers, fixes a surprising number of these.

If neither helps, the receiver board may be weak, and on most units that is a part rather than a new opener.

In Southwest Florida, only sometimes — and the honest answer depends on what is behind the door. If the garage is attached, has living space above it, or is used as a workshop or a gym, an insulated door makes a real difference to how hot that space gets in August. If it is a detached parking lot with a gap under the eaves, you are paying to insulate the outdoors.

There is a second reason that has nothing to do with heat: an insulated sandwich section is considerably more rigid than a single skin of steel, so the door is quieter, flexes less, and tends to stay straight longer. Some people buy them entirely for that.

Watch which R-value you are quoted. Manufacturers sometimes publish a calculated value for the insulating material rather than a tested value for the whole assembled section. Ask which one the number on the brochure is.

Yes, and we say the figure on the phone before you agree to anything. It covers attending, diagnosing and the first half hour of work, and it includes the balance test and the safety reverse test whether or not you go ahead with a repair.

We would rather charge a fair diagnostic than pretend to be free and make it back inside a part price. A free call-out is never free; it is just filed somewhere else on the invoice.

A blinking opener light during a close attempt is nearly always the photo-eyes. Something is in the beam, one has been knocked out of alignment, a lens is dirty or covered in web, or the sun is low and shining straight into the receiving eye at exactly the wrong time of day.

Start by wiping both lenses and checking that each one is aimed squarely at the other and that both brackets are tight. Most units show a steady light on one eye and a steady light on the other when they can see each other; if one is flickering, that is your answer.

If that does not do it, the wiring gets checked, usually at a staple somewhere along the wall. What does not happen is disconnecting the eyes to make the door close. A door with bridged eyes will close on anything.

On a standard residential door with the spring on the truck, about forty-five minutes to an hour, including balancing the door afterwards and running the safety tests. Two-spring doors are not much longer. What adds time is finding that the cables and drums took damage when the spring let go, which is common enough that we always look before quoting the total.

Yes — rolling steel, sectional dock doors and jackshaft operators. It is a different rhythm to residential work: those doors cycle dozens of times a day, so the sensible approach is a schedule rather than a phone call at eight on a Monday. There is a page on it under services.