Does Homeowners Insurance Cover Garage Door Repairs?

You will find the initial release of this content Does Homeowners Insurance Cover Garage Door Repairs? right here: www.ajsgaragedoorservice.com

No one likes to be hit by big, unexpected expenses. That’s why people buy insurance, right?   While this is true, unfortunately for homeowners who are facing a broken garage door, homeowners insurance doesn’t (usually) cover you.  We say “usually” because we are talking about the typical kind of repairs that are done to garage doors, such as replacing broken springs and/or cables, straightening out a door that has gone crooked in the hole, or replacing a dead or dying garage door opener.   There may well be certain instances when insurance can come into play, such as when someone drives through a garage door, but at that point you’re talking about a garage door replacement rather than a repair (and perhaps even some more structural repairs to the actual home or building itself).   Typical garage door repairs are more like ongoing maintenance than an insurance claim, and the reason why they are not covered.  Kind of like changing the oil in your car isn’t covered by your auto insurance.  The thing is, garage doors are big, heavy, mechanical doors with lots and lots of moving metal parts.  Over time, metal will wear out and break. The good news is that garage door parts typically last a very long time.  The bad news is that nothing lasts forever, so eventually something will break and will need to be repaired and replaced.   The most common repair on a garage door is the spring.  The garage door spring acts as the muscle that actually lifts and lowers the door under control.  When you consider a door can easily weigh a couple hundred pounds or more, and it gets opened and closed multiple times every day (in most households who use the garage as the main access to the home), you start to understand why these parts will eventually break. In the unlikely and unfortunate situation when there is actual damage to the door, such as someone hitting it with a car, then most of the time you’re better off replacing the entire door rather than trying to fix it.  While AJ’s Garage Door Service are experts at repairs and will do our best to fix whatever you have going on with your door, there are certain times when we will say that your money is better spent on a new door rather than continually trying to patch an old, broken down one.  And because we don’t sell, install or in any other way deal with brand new doors, if AJ’s says it’s time for a new door, you can rest assured it’s not because you’re being sold a bill of goods! There are times when there is damage to a single garage door panel that is enough to cause problems, but not enough to destroy the door.  In such cases, a common question is, “Can you replace one garage door panel?”   That is an excellent question, and one that deserves a bit more explanation.  We’ll do that in our next article. Can You Replace One Garage Door Panel? Overview of Garage Door Repairs by AJ’s here.  And don’t forget, we offer service to the entire greater Tucson area including Oro Valley and Vail, AZ.