How Long You Are Without the Door
A snapped lift cable usually means the door won't move at all, or it hangs crooked on one side with the other cable still holding. Either way, you don't want to force it with the opener - that bends the track or racks the door in the frame, which turns a cable job into a track-and-panel job. Most Lehigh Acres homes in the 1980s and 90s subdivisions still run the original two-cable torsion setup that came with the house, so once we're on site with the right size cable and drum hardware, the door is usually back down and tested the same visit. If the spring that drives those cables let go at the same time - which happens more than you'd think on original 1980s hardware - that adds time, because we're not leaving a door held up by one working side. We tell you straight if that's what we're looking at before we start.
What the Repair Takes
Lift cable repair is pulling the old cable off the drum and the bottom bracket, checking the drum and the stationary cone for wear, and running new galvanized cable at the correct length for your door's track and spring setup. On the tract housing built across Lehigh Acres between 1970 and 2006, drum sizes and cable gauges are fairly consistent within each era, so we carry stock for the common setups rather than special-ordering for every call. What we won't do is replace one cable and leave the other original - if one side let go from age, the other is on the same clock, and we'll tell you why replacing both now is cheaper than a second call in a few months. We also check the bottom brackets and rollers while the door is open, since a worn roller binding in the track is often what started the fray in the first place.
The Symptom
Listen for a loud bang followed by the door refusing to open or closing unevenly - that's a cable giving way, not the opener motor. You might also see one bottom corner of the door sitting lower than the other, or notice the cable itself looks like it's unwinding into loose strands near the bottom bracket or the drum. If the door is still partly working but the opener is straining and the door is slow or jerky on one side, that's often a cable fraying rather than fully broken - worth a call before it fails completely and leaves the door stuck down. Don't run the opener again once you see a visibly frayed or slack cable; that's exactly how a bent track or a dropped door on a car happens.
