Eight things we get called for
Read left to right, the way a door stacks. Three of these eight are most of the work; the rest are the ones people put off.
There is one job on this list we will not sell you, and it is on the list anyway: if your door is loud and old and the sections are sound, we would rather fit rollers and hinges than a new door. A quiet door for a hundred and forty dollars is a better outcome for you and a worse invoice for us, and it is still the right call.
Broken torsion spring
The door will not lift, or it lifted six inches and stopped dead. Look above the opening for a gap in the coil.
Opener repair
Grinding, humming, reversing, a remote that works from ten feet and not thirty. Most of it is not a new opener.
Cables and drums
One cable slack, the door hanging crooked in the opening. The drum lost its wrap; the cable has to be re-seated to a mark.
Off track and bent sections
A roller out of the track, a section creased by a bumper. We take it apart properly rather than forcing it back.
Rollers and hinges
The loud door. Ten steel rollers and a set of tired hinges are usually the whole of it.
New door and installation
When the sections are past repair, or you want an insulated door. Measured to your opening, not to a catalog.
Safety tune-up
Balance, reverse test, photo-eye alignment, fasteners, cable condition. The visit that catches the spring before it goes.
Commercial doors
Rolling steel, sectional dock doors, jackshaft operators. Doors that cycle forty times a day and are budgeted for, not panicked over.
Side section — the vertical track, the radius, and the rail forward to the header.
Nearly every job on this page happens somewhere in that drawing
The spring is on the header, out of the section and behind you. The drums and cables are at each end of it. The rollers ride the track from the floor, round the radius, and back along the ceiling — and the radius is where a door that is out of adjustment binds first, because it is the only part of the run where the leaf is changing direction.
The opener is the small box at the back. It is doing almost none of the lifting, which is why a door that has gone heavy shows up as an opener complaint.
Torsion or extension — and why it changes the conversation
There are two ways to hold up a garage door, and which one you have decides most of what a spring visit costs and how careful anybody has to be.
Torsion
A shaft above the opening carrying one or two springs that wind up as the door comes down. It is the better system: the load is central, the door travels straighter, and when a spring lets go it stays on the shaft. It is also the one that must never be touched without winding bars, because all of that stored energy is sitting in a coil with a cone on the end of it.
Extension
A long spring stretched along each horizontal track, usually on older or lighter doors. Cheaper to fit, and the reason it worries us is what happens at the end of its life. A stretched extension spring that snaps has nowhere to go but across the garage. Every extension spring should have a containment cable — a plain steel cable threaded down the middle of the spring and anchored at both ends, so that when the spring breaks the pieces are captured on the wire instead of leaving at speed. It costs almost nothing. We fit them as a matter of course, we will fit them to your existing springs as a standalone job, and if we find a set without them we will say so on the ticket whether or not you asked us to look.
What we do not do
Worth saying plainly, because it saves you a phone call.
We do not sell openers over the phone
Nearly every “my opener is dying” call turns out to be a limit switch, a drive gear, a bad safety eye or a door that is out of balance. A new opener bolted above a heavy door will die the same way the old one did, only sooner and with your money in it.
We do not do one-day-only pricing
There is no discount that expires at the end of the visit. The price we say on the phone is the price on the ticket unless we find something and tell you about it first.
We will not turn the force up to hide a problem
An opener that reverses is an opener doing its job. If it reverses when nothing is in the way, something is binding, and the answer is to find it. Winding the force up so the door pushes through the bind is the single most common unsafe thing done to garage doors, and it is the reason the sample ticket on our home page has a refused line on it.
We do not fit a spring without writing down what it is
Wire size, inside diameter, length, wind direction and cycle rating go on your paper. The next person to touch your door — us or anyone else — should not have to guess.