Home/Commercial
For San Diego businesses and property managers
When the door is down, the business is down.
A stuck roll-up on a Monday morning is not a maintenance issue. It is deliveries waiting in the street, a bay you cannot use, and staff standing around. We work commercial overhead doors, dock doors and gates across San Diego, 6 AM to 10 PM, seven days a week.
Free on-site assessment. The owner answers the phone, so you are not in a dispatch queue.
- 6 AM to 10 PM, 7 days
- Free on-site assessment
- Direct line to the technician
- Locally owned and operated
Straight talk
What we are, and what we are not
You have probably been let down by a national contractor before. A ticket number, a four hour window that becomes tomorrow, and a technician who has to phone someone else for permission to quote.
We are a small shop. That has one disadvantage and several advantages, and you should know both before you call.
The disadvantage: we are not a fleet. If you run a large distribution centre with twenty dock positions and need a guaranteed one hour response under contract at three in the morning, a national outfit is the right choice and we will say so.
The advantages, for everyone else:
- You call one number and reach the person who does the work. No dispatcher, no ticket, no callback
- The person who quotes is the person who fixes it, so the number does not change on the way to approval
- We tell you when a repair beats a replacement, including when the replacement would have paid us more
- You are a business, not an account number. Small operations get treated as a priority rather than filler between larger contracts
Most commercial doors in San Diego are not on a distribution centre. They are on an auto shop, a storage facility, a restaurant's back bay, a small warehouse, a car wash, or an apartment building's parking gate. That is our work.
Who we work for
The properties where a stuck door stops the day
Auto shops and body shops
Bay doors that cycle dozens of times a day. High-cycle springs, panel damage, and openers worked far harder than a residential unit ever is.
Warehouses and small distribution
Sectional and rolling steel service doors. Dock positions where an out-of-service door means a trailer waits and a schedule slips.
Self storage
Roll-up unit doors in volume, plus the perimeter gate and access control that decides whether tenants can get to their units at all.
Apartment buildings and HOAs
Parking gates, garage entries, keypads and intercom. Where a failure becomes a tenant complaint within the hour and a liability question after.
Retail and restaurants
Back-of-house roll-ups and security grilles. Doors that have to close and lock at the end of a shift, without fail.
Fleet and municipal yards
Vehicle bays, wash bays and equipment stores. Wide openings, heavy doors, and hardware that gets caught by machinery.
What we service
Commercial door and gate systems
| Type | Where you see it | What usually fails |
|---|---|---|
| Rolling steel | Storage, loading bays, security grilles, tight headroom | Barrel spring tension, slat damage, guides, bottom bar |
| Sectional overhead | Warehouses, dock positions, auto shops | Springs, cables, rollers, panels hit by machinery |
| High-cycle openings | Any door running dozens of times a day | Standard-cycle springs fitted where high-cycle belonged |
| Commercial operators | Jackshaft and trolley units on heavy doors | Gearbox, logic board, limit settings, safety devices |
| Vehicle gates | Parking entries, yards, storage perimeters | Operator, photo eye, loop detector, hinges and track |
| Access control | Gated parking, tenant entries | Keypads, intercom, telephone entry, loop boards |
Also: fire door drop testing and specialised dock equipment such as levellers and restraints are separate trades. If your building needs those, we will tell you plainly rather than take the job and improvise.
The thing worth buying
Scheduled maintenance, not emergency calls
Almost every commercial door emergency was visible weeks earlier. A frayed cable strand, a spring past its cycle count, a roller that stopped rolling, a bolt working loose. None of it announces itself. All of it is obvious to someone looking on a scheduled visit.
The arithmetic is not complicated. Replacing a worn roller during a planned visit costs a fraction of what a snapped cable costs when it takes the door off its track, damages two panels, and stops the bay mid-shift. Industry figures put doors on regular maintenance at meaningfully longer service life with roughly half the unplanned failures, and the reason is simply that parts get replaced before they fail under load rather than after.
What a commercial maintenance visit covers:
- Spring condition and cycle assessment against how hard the door actually works
- Cables inspected at drums and bottom brackets, where fraying starts out of sight
- Rollers, hinges, bearings and track, with a straightedge on the track
- Every bolt and bracket checked and tightened
- Operator function, limit settings, and force settings verified rather than assumed
- Safety devices tested, on doors and on gates
- Seals and bottom bar, which drive both energy cost and pest access
- A written list of what is fine, what is wearing, and what needs doing now
Frequency depends on cycles, not the calendar
A residential door opens about four times a day. A busy shop bay can do that before nine in the morning. Cycle count is what wears a door out, so a door running twenty times a day needs looking at several times more often than the annual advice written for houses.
Within a couple of miles of the coast, shorten the interval again. Salt air does real damage to springs and cables.
The one that catches everyone
Forklift damage, and what to do about it
The most common cause of commercial door damage is not wear. It is contact. A forklift, a pallet corner, a truck backing up, a delivery driver in a hurry.
Two things follow from that, and both save money:
- A struck door rarely needs full replacement. On a sectional door, one damaged section can usually be replaced. On rolling steel, individual slats can be swapped. Get it assessed before anyone quotes you a whole door
- The damage repeats unless the cause is fixed. Bollards, guide rails, or moving where pallets stage will stop the same panel being hit again next quarter. We will point out what is causing it, because fixing the door repeatedly is worse business for you and does not make us look good either
A struck door also goes out of alignment even when the panel looks fine. That is what quietly destroys rollers and track over the following months.
Liability
Gate safety, if you manage property
If your property has an automatic vehicle gate that tenants, customers or the public pass through, the safety standard that applies to it is worth knowing before an incident rather than after.
Since 1 August 2018, UL 325 has required a minimum of two external monitored entrapment protection devices per entrapment zone, per direction of travel. ASTM F2200 separately governs how the gate itself is built: roller guards, screening, and a slide gate that cannot fall if it is disconnected.
Most gates installed before 2018 have a single device, or rely on force sensing alone. That was acceptable at the time. It is not what the current standard describes, and on a property with tenants that gap is worth documenting and closing.
How to start
A free on-site assessment
STEP 01
You call or text
Tell us the property type, how many doors or gates, and whether anything is down right now.
STEP 02
We walk the site
Every door and gate, assessed against how hard it actually works. No charge for this.
STEP 03
You get it in writing
What is fine, what is wearing, what needs doing now, and what can wait a year.
STEP 04
You decide
Fix what is urgent, schedule the rest, or do nothing. The assessment is yours either way.
The assessment is genuinely free and genuinely useful even if you never hire us. If your doors are in good condition, that is what the report will say.
San Diego and the surrounding area
Something down right now?
Say so when you call and we will tell you honestly what we can do and when. If we cannot get to you fast enough, we will say that too rather than book you and leave you waiting.
(619) 576-0055