Spokane, WA

Where we work

Open Now Garage Doors covers Spokane County and the towns around it. These are the areas we are in most days.

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A door off its track is the fault we are called out for most often in Spokane, and it is the one homeowners least expect. Nothing wears visibly, nothing sounds wrong, and then one morning the door will not lift and the car is shut in. Around South Hill and North Side we see it concentrated in pre-war craftsman homes with detached garages and newer north-side builds, where deep freezes snap cold-shortened springs and freeze doors to the slab.

Ten or twelve rollers carry the door inside a steel channel, and the channel is what keeps the door flat in the opening. Lose one roller out of the channel and that corner drops. The panel it belongs to twists, which levers the rollers above and below it out as well, and the failure runs up the door faster than you can get to the button.

The van covers Spokane and Spokane Valley, Cheney, Liberty Lake daily. You get a two-hour window rather than a day, a free written estimate, and what was agreed on the driveway is what happens.

What you are probably seeing

One side of the door sits lower than the other and the panel edge is out of the track.
The door moves but grinds badly and the track is visibly bent.
There is a fresh dent or scrape where the door met something solid.
The door binds halfway and you can see the roller sitting outside its channel.
The gap along one side of the door has opened up and daylight shows through.

This is the fault you can diagnose from the driveway. The two sides of the door are at different heights. There is daylight along one edge that was not there before. The door moves partway and then binds, or grinds instead of rolling, and you can usually see the roller sitting proud of its channel.

If any of that matches, a technician can diagnose it on site in about ten minutes. We do not guess at it down the phone, and we do not charge to look.

What people get told that is not true

Bent track can be hammered straight.

It can be made to look straight. It will not run true, and the rollers will keep leaving it. A bent vertical track section gets replaced, not straightened.

It came off because the track is old.

Track does not fail with age. Something caused it - a seized roller, a slipped cable drum, a loose bracket, or an impact. If the cause is not found the door comes off again within weeks, which is why we look for it rather than just reseating the rollers.

You can push it back on yourself.

The door is still connected to a loaded counterbalance while it is off the track. Levering a panel back into the channel with the spring still wound is how people get hurt, and how a realignment turns into a panel replacement.

None of that is unique to Spokane. It is simply what happens when a door is quoted over the phone by somebody who has not seen it, and it is the reason we do not give prices before a technician has stood in front of the door.

What happens if it is left

People put this off, and it is worth being straight about where that goes. None of the following is unusual - it is the ordinary sequence, and we see it in Spokane every week.

The damage spreads upwardWhat starts at one corner reaches the hinges, then the horizontal track, then a panel.
And the cause is still thereWhatever put the door off its track has not gone away just because the door was pushed back.
It gets worse every time it movesA door out of its channel is not stable. Each attempt to run it pulls more of the assembly out of line.
The opening is not secureA door that will not close properly is an open door as far as the house is concerned, particularly on an attached garage.

The visit and the written estimate are free, so finding out where you stand costs you nothing at all. That is the whole reason to call early rather than late.

When the calls come, and why

Two weeks a year account for a disproportionate share of what we do in Spokane County. They are the first hard cold and the first serious storm, and both work the same way - they do not create a fault, they finish one that was already there.

A spring at eighty per cent of its cycle life survives a mild morning and fails on a cold one. A cable with three broken strands holds until the day the door is asked to move against a frozen bottom seal. The weather is the trigger, not the cause.

That is why a five-minute inspection in the fall is worth more than any product you can buy. Rust on the coils, frayed strands near the bottom brackets, and a door that will not stay put at waist height are the three things worth looking for.

If any of the three is there, it is far better dealt with on your schedule than on the morning the car is trapped behind it.

A Spokane home of the kind we are called out to most days

What happens between your call and a working door

The call itself takes about three minutes. We ask what the door is doing, what it sounds like, whether anything is visibly out of place, and roughly how old it is. That is usually enough to know which parts the van needs.

Loading the van from that description is the part that decides whether your off-track garage door repair is a one-visit job or a two-visit job. It is also the part a national dispatch number cannot do, because it does not know who is coming.

On site the technician confirms the diagnosis on the door. Sometimes the phone description was wrong - a 'broken opener' is quite often a broken spring - and it is better to find that out with the parts already in the van.

The estimate is written before work starts. The repair itself is usually under two hours, and the door is tested and balanced before anyone leaves.

What is actually going wrong

Track does not wear out; it gets moved. Something puts it there - a bumper, a cable letting go on one side, a roller that seized and dragged, or years of vibration working the lag bolts loose until the vertical section is no longer vertical. Which of those it was decides whether the repair holds.

Done properly, the door's weight comes off the track first with proper support. Then the rollers are seated section by section from the bottom, every hinge is checked for the elongated holes that a derailment leaves behind, and the vertical track is trued against a level rather than by eye. Bent sections are replaced; a track that has been hammered back into shape will let the door off again.

There is nearly always a cause sitting behind the derailment, and skipping it is why some doors come off twice in a month. A seized roller, a drum that slipped a wrap, or a bracket that worked loose are the usual three. The job is not finished until one of them has been found and dealt with.

What the van carries

The difference between a job finished today and a job finished on Thursday is almost always whether the right part was on the van when it arrived. So the van is loaded for what Spokane actually breaks rather than for a national average.

Springs in the common sizes, lift cables, drums, rollers, hinges, brackets, opener gear kits, remotes, safety sensors and weather seal all travel with the technician. Panels and complete doors are ordered, and we tell you that at the estimate rather than on the day.

It is also why the description you give on the phone matters. Tell us what the door is doing, what it sounds like, whether it is a single or a double and roughly how old it is, and the van leaves already carrying the answer.

What to use, and what to stop using

The most common thing we find on a badly maintained door in Spokane is not neglect - it is the wrong product applied enthusiastically.

WD-40 is a water displacer and a solvent. Sprayed on hinges and rollers it strips the grease that was doing the job and leaves a film that attracts dust. It has a place on a garage door and that place is nowhere.

Grease on the track is the other one. The track is not a bearing surface - the rollers roll along it. Grease turns it into a grit collector that grinds the roller bearings out.

What you want is a white lithium or silicone garage door lubricant, on the hinge pivots, the roller stems, the spring coils, the bearing plates and the opener rail. Twice a year, wiped rather than flooded.

Torsion spring, shaft and cable drum above a garage door in Spokane, WA

Brands we work on

Garage door mechanisms are far more alike than the badges suggest, and the parts that fail are common across brands. These are the ones we see most in Spokane.

Brand	Notes
Sommer / Marantec	Less common here, direct-drive heads, and the parts have to be ordered - so we confirm the model before the van is loaded.
Genie	Screw-drive and belt-drive heads. Intellicode remotes and carriage assemblies are the usual failure points, and both are parts rather than a reason to change the opener.
Clopay	The most common door brand we work on. Panels, hinges and struts are orderable individually, so one damaged section does not mean a whole door.
Craftsman	Built on Chamberlain internals for most of their production run, so the gear kits and boards are shared and readily available.
Amarr	Sections and hardware are widely available and the tracking is standard, which keeps repair costs sensible.
Wayne Dalton	The TorqueMaster counterbalance is a spring inside the tube rather than on it, and it needs its own tools and its own parts. We carry them.

Not listed is not a problem. Residential doors are overwhelmingly standard hardware, and the handful that are not are identified from the model number in about ten seconds on the phone.

How we work

One technician, one van, one job at a time, and the same process whether it is two in the afternoon or two in the morning.

The fault is confirmed on the door rather than guessed at down a phone line. The work is written down before anything is touched. Nothing is added afterwards - if something else is found once the door is apart, it is shown to you and agreed separately.

The door is cycled, balanced and its safety reversal tested before we leave, and the work is warranted in writing. That is the whole of it, across Spokane County.

Service area

Everywhere in Spokane, plus Spokane Valley, Cheney, Liberty Lake. Same rates across the whole area - there is no difference wherever you are inside it, and nothing charged for coming out.

South Hill
North Side
Browne's Addition
Shadle Park
Indian Trail
Spokane Valley
Cheney
Liberty Lake

Not on the list? Call anyway. The radius is about drive time rather than boundaries, and plenty of Spokane County falls inside it without having a line on this page.

Talk to someone who does this every day

If the door in your Spokane garage is doing any of the things on this page, the fastest route to an answer is a phone call. Describe what it is doing and you will get a straight opinion on whether it needs somebody today or whether it can wait.

No call center, no booking charge, and nothing at all for the visit or the estimate. We cover Spokane and Spokane Valley, Cheney, Liberty Lake.

Where we work

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Areas we cover around Spokane

Browne's Addition

Shadle Park

Indian Trail

Spokane Valley

Cheney

Liberty Lake

South Hill

North Side