Garage door services

Springs are rated in cycles rather than years, one cycle being a full open and close. A common residential torsion spring is rated somewhere around ten thousand cycles, so a household that opens the door four times a day reaches that a great deal sooner than one that opens it twice. It is why two identical doors on the same street can fail years apart. A spring approaching the end of its life often gives some warning: the door feels heavier by hand, it judders on the way up, or it no longer holds position when stopped halfway.

Almost always the photo-eye sensors near the floor, or the down-force setting on the opener. The sensors face each other across the opening and the door refuses to close if the beam between them is broken or if one has been nudged out of line. Check for a box, a bin or a stray leaf in the path first, then check that both indicator lights are steady rather than blinking. If the sensors are clear and aligned, the opener may be reading normal floor contact as an obstruction and needs adjusting.

It depends entirely on the noise. A steady mechanical hum is usually just the opener doing its job. Grinding, scraping or a rhythmic bang as the door travels normally points at rollers, worn bearings or track alignment, and those are worth attending to early because a misaligned track puts uneven load on everything else. A single loud bang from an otherwise idle door is different: that is the sound a spring makes when it breaks, and the door should not be used until somebody has looked at it.

Often, yes. If the door is a current model and the section is still manufactured, a single panel can usually be swapped without touching the rest of the door. Two things make it less straightforward: an older or discontinued door where the section no longer exists in that profile or colour, and damage that has travelled into the tracks or the rollers rather than staying in the panel. Both are visible on inspection, which is why this one is hard to answer honestly over the phone.

Once a year suits most households, and it is mostly a matter of keeping small things small. A service means checking the door balance with the opener disengaged, inspecting cables and rollers for wear, tightening hardware that has vibrated loose, testing the safety reverse, and lubricating the moving parts. Doors used many times a day, or living in a dusty environment, benefit from being looked at more often than that.

A door that rises unevenly, with one side leading the other, has usually lost tension or travel on one side. Common causes are a stretched or frayed lift cable, a roller that has come out of its track, or a spring that has weakened. It matters more than it looks: a crooked door loads its tracks and rollers unevenly and wears them out faster, and where a cable is failing it can jam or drop. Stop using it and have it looked at.

The bottom seal does the real work, keeping out water, dust, leaves and a good deal of draught. When it hardens and cracks with age you tend to notice it as damp along the inside edge or grit blowing under the door. It is one of the cheapest parts on the whole assembly and one of the easiest to replace, and it is the sort of thing worth mentioning while somebody is already there for something else.