Garage door repair in Orléans

Orléans by decade

Orléans was farmland along the Ottawa River until the late 1960s. Queenswood Heights, between St. Joseph Boulevard and Innes Road, was the first large subdivision, established in 1962, and Convent Glen and Orléans Wood followed through the 1970s. Chapel Hill and Fallingbrook came in the 1980s and 1990s; Fallingbrook broke ground in 1985 and now runs from Tenth Line Road to Trim Road. Avalon did not exist until the late 1990s. It, Notting Gate and Cardinal Creek were built through the 2000s on narrower lots with more townhouses among the detached houses.

The population went from about 6,000 in 1971 to about 24,000 in 1981 and 107,823 in 2011. More than half the dwellings are detached houses and about three in ten are townhouses. So a repair call here is nearly always one of two doors: a two-car door on a detached house, or a single door on a townhouse where that door is the only way the car gets out.

The ground under Orléans

Much of Orléans sits on thick beds of silt and clay left by the Champlain Sea, the deposit engineers here call Leda clay. It runs from a thin skin to 30 or 40 metres deep, and in places 95 metres, and the surface conditions across the district range from solid rock to very soft clay. In Avalon the developer went back to houses already built to fix their foundations.

A garage door notices this before the house does. The slab and the apron in front of it move with the ground, and the door shows it: the bottom seal shuts tight on one side and leaves a strip of daylight on the other, the tracks drift out of plumb so the rollers bind at the same spot every time, and an opener whose force setting was fine in July starts reversing the door in February when the bottom rail meets a lip of heaved concrete. All of that can be adjusted from inside the garage. Tracks can be re-plumbed, a taller bottom seal can meet an uneven slab, and the opener's travel and force can be reset. A slab that keeps moving is a foundation question, and a new seal every winter is the wrong answer to it.

Townhouse doors and two-car doors

A townhouse door in Avalon or Chapel Hill South is 8 or 9 feet wide and hangs on a single torsion spring, or on the older streets a pair of extension springs. When that one spring breaks there is no half-lift; the door is dead until it is replaced, and a townhouse with one bay has no second door to use. That is the call the 24-hour line exists for.

A two-car door is 16 feet wide on a pair of torsion springs, and the pair is replaced together. The surviving spring has done the same number of cycles as the one that broke. DASMA, the door manufacturers' association, writes its residential standard for a minimum of 10,000 cycles, one cycle being closed to open and back, and expects a residential door to run under 1,500 cycles a year. A door installed with an Avalon house in 2005 has been through twenty winters and, at a family's rate of use, its original spring pair has done its rated cycles. The cables should go with it: a cable that has run on a worn spring is frayed at the drum, and doing the two in one visit is cheaper than two visits.

The drive from Nepean

The shop is at 46 Grenfell Crescent in Nepean, about 30 km by road from Place d'Orléans. Protech is not an Orléans firm, and its address is not in Orléans. What it has that the local pins do not is a phone line that answers at 2 a.m. Repairs are booked same day. Give the street when you call: Cumberland village and Navan are covered by the same van, but they are a further run out Old Montreal Road and Innes Road, and that changes the time you are given.

Prices

The bill is the part plus the visit, and no honest number can be given before someone has seen the door. A single torsion spring on a townhouse door, a pair on a two-car door, a cable set, a gear kit for an opener that runs but does not lift, and a new opener are five different parts at five different prices. The cheapest repair is the one done before the second part fails, which is why a spring call in Orléans is usually a spring-and-cables call. For a door that is rusted through along the bottom panel, or a 1970s door in Queenswood Heights that was never insulated, ask for the repair figure and the replacement figure together.

Call from anywhere in Orléans

(613) 845-9950 rings at any hour. For a new-door quote with no urgency behind it, email info@protechgarage.ca.