The four failures that account for most Yakima call-outs
Residential doors fail in a narrow set of ways, and knowing which one you are looking at saves a call.
A broken torsion spring
The most common by a wide margin. A bang from the garage, then a door that will not lift or that the opener refuses to move more than a few inches. Pull the release cord and try lifting by hand — a healthy door feels like it weighs about ten pounds, a door with a broken spring feels like all 150 of them. Full detail in our broken spring guide, and pricing on the spring repair page.
A frayed or snapped lift cable
Shows up as a door hanging visibly crooked, or a loose coil of cable at the bottom of one track. Because springs and cables share a load path, a snapped cable very often means a spring is at the end of its life too. Stop using the door — see cable repair.
Worn rollers and dry bearings
Grinding, rumbling, or a shudder as the door travels. This is the cheapest thing on the list to fix and the one most often ignored until it takes the track with it. Sealed nylon rollers are dramatically quieter than the steel ones most builders fit — worth the small premium on a garage under a bedroom. See roller repair.
Photo-eye and opener faults
A door that reverses the moment it touches the floor, or refuses to close and flashes the opener light, is usually a photo-eye out of alignment rather than a failed opener. The valley supplies plenty of fine agricultural dust, and a dusty lens reads as a blocked beam. Wipe both eyes and check the indicator LEDs before booking anything — see opener repair if that does not clear it.
What a family-safe door actually needs
Two safety systems matter more than anything else on a residential door, and both are quick to test.
Auto-reverse on contact. Lay a length of 2x4 flat on the floor in the door's path and close the door. It must strike the wood and reverse. If it keeps pushing, the down-force setting is wrong and the door is dangerous around children and pets.
Photo-eye reversal. With the door closing, break the beam with a broom handle. The door must stop and reverse immediately. Both eyes should sit no higher than six inches off the floor — high enough to miss debris, low enough to catch a child.
We run both tests on every visit regardless of what we were called out for, and we will tell you if a door fails. Any quote that does not include a safety-reversal check is not a finished job.
Detached garages and older homes
Yakima's older neighbourhoods have a lot of detached single-car garages with wood doors that have been in service for decades. They are worth keeping where the frame is sound, but they need different handling: the door has usually lost moisture and weight since it was hung, so the original springs are now over-sprung and the door creeps open on its own. Re-springing to the door's actual current weight fixes that permanently, and it is a repair, not a replacement.
The other thing we see on older detached garages is a track fastened to a header that has moved. Realigning the track without addressing the header just moves the problem along a few months. We will say when that is the situation rather than quietly re-shimming it.