Expert Garage Door Repair,
Service, & Installation in
Chico, CA

Chico's census table carries weight at both ends. 9,334 of the city's 45,451 housing units were standing before 1960, and 10,577 have gone up since 2000. Neither end is a rounding error, which means an address is no shortcut: it will not tell us how the door in that garage is balanced, what the track is bolted into on either side, or what is hanging from the ceiling above it. All of that gets read at the garage.

Nor does the middle of the table pick a winner. The 1980s account for 7,812 of those units and the 1970s for 7,220 — set one against the other and the difference is 592 units, with 1,097 of sampling error sitting on it. The census will not rank those two, so neither will we. A quote here is a measurement taken on site rather than a lookup, and the parts it turns on — springs, cables, rollers, hinges, track and the opener overhead — are sized to the door once somebody can put hands on it.

One number on this job does hold still through all of that, and it is worth knowing before we pull up. Where a pair of photoelectric safety sensors is fitted across the opening, DASMA — the trade association whose members build these operators — publishes the height they are allowed to sit at: "These sensors must not be installed higher than six inches above the garage floor." That is not a function of the build year. It reads the same at a house from the forties as at one finished since 2000, which makes it a rare thing on a Chico call: a measurement we are sure of before we see the door.

Whose rule it is matters, because it gets miscited. The figure is DASMA's, and manufacturers repeat it in the installation instructions packed with an opener. The federal standard for openers carries no mounting height at all — it defers to those instructions, which is where the number actually lives.

That sensor pair is also one of the few parts of a door whose height is somebody's decision rather than the door's. Knocked askew, it goes back up wherever the bracket happens to reach; or an installer sets it high deliberately, to keep a door from balking at an empty opening. Either way the beam crosses the opening above the height it was put there to watch, and a closing door no longer has anything looking at the floor. So we sight both eyes against the concrete directly beneath them on every call, whatever else the door turns out to need.