Edit 4/4: Precision Door reached out to apologize for my experience (after seeing my review) and stated they would refund the amount charged for the service call. I appreciate their professional response.
[Original review]
I asked Precision Door to come look at my garage door to see what was wrong and was VERY unhappy with their response.
I have 3 single garage doors and the one we use most stopped working suddenly during operation. When I looked at it, I could see that the cables that pull provide the spring-activated tension on the door had both come off of their spools and were wrapped around the torsion bar. Not knowing anything about garage doors, I called in the "experts".
After looking at the door for less than 30 minutes, they provided a quote that was approximately $2000 to fix the same problem on all 3 doors, or $1000 to fix just the one that was broken.
In their opinion the following list of parts needed to be replaced, for each door:
234-35 Precision standard quality torsion spring.
Torsion tube 9' 9' 16 GA
Torsion cable for 8' door
End plate w/flanged bearing
Flanged ball bearing for center or end plate
I called a friend who had more experience with garage door repair than I did. After 45 minutes, we had the issue fixed - for $0.
Turns out the spring had simply come loose and lost all tension. After re-winding the spring and cables to the appropriate specs (found by a quick google search), and tightened down the bolts holding the spring to the torsion bar, all was well.
Now, in all fairness, there WAS wear on all 3 of the torsion bars. This is not surprising given that they are likely very old and could do with some preventative maintenance. However, the springs were NOT broken.
The prices quoted for the maintenance items were outrageous. However, I'm not as mad with the high quote, as I am with the fact that the door could have been fixed during the initial service call by ANY qualifited and honest repairman. This was proven to me by the fact that 2 non-experts fixed it in less than an hour with no cost.
The Precision technician could have fixed the issue AND explained that there were some worn parts that needed replacing soon and provided a quote for that. Instead, I had to live without a garage door for aweek until I had time to fix it without the "Expert" assistance.
Any EXPERT should have seen the issue right away and fixed it for the cost of the service call (or a small additional fee, if he was slow, I guess). But to tell me it couldn't be fixed withbout at least $1000 of parts and labor is bordering on criminal. Also telling me that the spring was 'broken' and providing a quote to replace all 3 springs - when none of them was broken at all - was just plain lying.
Also - (and this isn't directly Precision Door's fault), in the process of these 2 ameteurs fixing the spring, the door got stuck during our testing and ended up burning out the opener motor. So, went and bought a new opener at Lowes and installed it myself. Mind, it was an old opener, but it worked fine, and I would have been happy to not replace it for a while longer. And, while it was not Precision Door that broke it, if they had simply fixed the door when they were here, I wouldn't have had to be messing with it and broken my opener motor. read more