Repair or Replace Assessment

The Decision, and What It Actually Rests On

Once the six tests are done, there is a call to make. It rests on two questions and neither of them is how old the door is.

The first: are the sections sound. The second: can the hardware still be bought. Everything else is detail.

Sound Sections, Bad Hardware: Repair

This is the overwhelming majority of doors we assess, and it is a repair almost every time.

Springs are consumables. A standard 10,000 cycle spring on a door used four times a day is due at around seven years, and that is the spring wearing out on schedule, not the door failing. Cables, rollers and hinges are the same kind of item at a smaller scale.

Add every one of those parts up on a typical two car sectional and you are still well short of what a new door costs before anybody climbs a ladder. Hardware is the cheap part. That is the whole reason the answer usually comes out as repair, and it is why a company that only sells doors rarely arrives at it.

A door built in 1998 with clean sections, straight track and tired springs is a repair. A door built in 2016 whose bottom section is soft at the seam may not be. The year stamped on the label is not doing any work in this decision.

What Genuinely Makes It a Replacement

Three findings, and we will show you each of them on your own door rather than assert them.

A rusted through or delaminating bottom section. On steel, corrosion starts on the inside face of the lowest section where condensation collects and, near the water, where salt gets in. By the time it shows on the outside there is nothing solid left to bolt a bottom bracket to. That bracket carries the full lift load through the cable, so a soft seam is not cosmetic. On wood doors the same verdict comes from delamination along the bottom rail, where the plies have separated and swollen.

Hinge points torn out. Repeated repairs at the same hinge, each one moving a fastener half an inch to find fresh steel, eventually leave a section with nothing to grip. Once the steel around the holes has torn, that section is done and you cannot buy one section for a discontinued door.

One piece tilt up with unsourceable jamb hardware. Huntington Beach still has plenty of these on garages from the fifties and sixties. When the pivot arms, jamb brackets or spring anchors wear out and nobody manufactures the pattern any more, there is no repair available at any price. This is the one case where the honest answer is replace, and it is genuinely about age, just not in the way the phrase is normally used.

Two Things You Will Never Hear From Us

That your door is old. It is not a diagnosis. It is what gets said when nobody has run the balance test, and it should prompt you to ask which test produced it.

That a broken spring means a new door. A spring call turning into a door sale is the most common upsell in this trade, by a distance. The spring broke because it reached its cycle count. That fact carries no information at all about the sections above it.

What You Get

A verdict with the reasoning attached, photographs of anything we are calling a failure, and a price for each option where both are genuinely available. If it is a repair, we will say so and do it. If it is a replacement, you will get the reason, and you are free to take that reason to somebody else for a second opinion.

Call (714) 851-4559.