Overhead Door Installation

Harder than it looks, and the difficulty is not the door. A commercial overhead door involves working at height, handling heavy sections or a coiled curtain, winding torsion springs that store enough energy to cause serious injury, verifying that the structure above the opening can carry the load, and wiring and commissioning a powered operator with its safety devices. Each of those is a specialist task, and the spring work in particular is a genuine hazard rather than a difficulty. This is not a general-trades job.

There is no universal figure, because it depends on the door type, the track or barrel it uses, and the headroom and side room the manufacturer requires — a standard-lift sectional, a low-headroom track and a rolling steel curtain all want different things around the same nominal opening. That is exactly why we measure rather than working from a nominal size. If you are building new, send the drawings early and we will tell you what the opening needs to be before the wall goes up, which is far less expensive than adjusting it after.

A like-for-like replacement into a sound existing opening is normally about a day per door, and the bay is back in use the same day. Multiple openings go faster per door once a crew is mobilised. What extends it is structural work on the jambs or header, new electrical supply, or concrete — all of which we identify at the measure rather than discovering on the day.

Allow 2–4 weeks for manufacture once the measure and any shop drawings are approved, plus 1–2 weeks to schedule the crew — so roughly 3–6 weeks from approval to a working door. Doors are made to your opening; there is no stock unit to pull off a shelf. On new construction we work to the site programme, which usually means the measure happens later than everyone would like and the schedule is tighter than it needs to be.

Yes, and it is how most replacement work is done. Openings come out of service one at a time so the rest of the building keeps operating, and the work is scheduled around your shifts — nights and weekends are routine on distribution and manufacturing sites. The exception is concrete work, where the cure time keeps an opening out for several days; that is planned rather than squeezed in.

Yes, and it is quoted as its own line so you can see it. Removal is more involved than it sounds on a powered door — the operator, wiring and controls come out too, and the springs have to be de-tensioned safely before anything is dismantled. Steel doors and curtains go for recycling.

Our own. It matters more on overhead doors than on most trades, because the spring work, the operator commissioning and the safety-device setup are all places where the difference between a trained crew and a general one shows up later rather than on the day. It is also why the people who install a door are the people who come back to service it.

Before the openings are formed, if possible. Headroom, side room, backroom for track, structural capacity of the header, and power at the opening are all much less expensive to get right in drawings than in concrete. The most common avoidable problem we are called to solve on new builds is an opening that cannot take the door specified for it — usually because the headroom was allocated to services after the door was chosen.

Sometimes, and we will be straight about when we would rather not. If a door arrives without the hardware, springs or track it should have, or is the wrong specification for the opening, the installation will be blamed for what was actually a supply problem — and rightly, we will not warrant someone else's specification. Where the door is sound and complete, supplied installation is a normal arrangement, particularly on GC-procured projects.