The Situation
Across the areas this shop covers - and the rest of the nine named areas nearby - the housing stock mostly went up between 1979 and 2007, with the median build year landing around 2001. That's not ancient, but it's old enough that a lot of original garage doors and openers are still in service, or were swapped once already for a builder-grade replacement in the 2000s.
The door on a house from that era is usually a steel sectional, single or double layer, put in without much thought to how hot it gets against a west-facing wall. Nobody was thinking about insulation ratings when these subdivisions went; they were thinking about cost per unit. So you get a lot of thin steel panels, factory torsion springs sized for a 20-year lifespan, and openers that are now on their second or third capacitor.
This isn't a story about neglect. It's a story about a specific 25-30 year window of construction that put a lot of similar doors on a lot of similar houses at the same time, which means a lot of them are wearing out on a similar schedule now.},{
