Garage door repair in Manchester

In this climate almost every call is one of five things: a broken spring, a door frozen to the slab, a door off its track, a snapped cable, or an opener that has given up. Four of the five are worse between December and March, and telling them apart takes about a minute.

The thing most people have backwards

The opener does not lift your garage door. The springs do.

A double door is heavy enough that you would struggle to raise it unaided. The torsion spring above the opening is wound to counterbalance nearly all of that weight, so a healthy door is close to weightless on its tracks. The opener contributes only the small push that is left over.

When a spring lets go, the entire weight drops onto a motor built for a fraction of it. The opener strains, hums, stops partway, or trips its overload and reverses. The homeowner reasonably concludes the opener has died. Usually it has not. The ten-second check is here.

Why winter runs the repair calendar here

Springs fail on the cold snaps. A spring is rated in cycles — one up and one down — and not in years. Steel is slightly more brittle cold and contracts overnight, so a spring already near the end of its life tends to break on the first hard morning rather than on a mild one. If yours went at seven in the morning in January, that is not bad luck.

Ice bonds the door to the concrete. Snow comes off the car, melts on the warmer slab, runs to the lowest point — the threshold — and freezes there overnight. By morning the rubber seal is stuck fast. Press the button and the opener will try anyway, and something has to give: a stripped gear, a bent top panel, or a cable jumping the drum. What to do instead, and what not to do.

Road salt does the slow damage. New Hampshire salts generously, and every trip home brings brine into the garage on the wheel arches. It drips onto the bottom of the tracks, the lowest rollers, the hinges and the bottom panel — which is exactly where a door is least forgiving of corrosion. Doors here rust from the ground up.

Grease stiffens. The lubricant on the torsion bar and in the opener's gearbox thickens as it gets properly cold, and a door that was merely sluggish in November becomes a door that strains in January.

Older houses, wooden doors

Much of Manchester's housing stock predates the war, and a good number of those garages still carry wood. Wood takes on moisture through a humid summer and gives it back in a dry heated winter, so the door swells, binds in the opening, and then shrinks again. An owner reports "it sticks in summer" and assumes the opener is weak; the door is simply bigger than its opening.

Wood is also heavier than steel, which matters twice: the springs work harder, and when one fails the falling weight is greater.

Sorting it out in a minute

Where we send calls

Manchester and the towns around it: Bedford, Goffstown, Hooksett, Londonderry, Derry, Auburn, Candia, and as far as Concord.