ALL AMERICAN DOORS INC

Our initial garage door that came with the house (and was bent at the top before we moved in) never gave us the slightest problem opening or closing for the whole two years that we used it. We wanted a door that was more structurally sound (not bent). On July 31 of this year (2019), All American Doors, Inc., in Abilene (TX) installed a new door for upwards of a grand and a half. Their techs connected the door to the motor (operator) and made all the adjustments. After the installation, we left their connections and adjustments untouched just as they left it. The door worked okay until October 28 when temperatures dropped below freezing. On Nov. 4, 2019, I phoned All American Doors and asked that someone come fix the door. The woman on the phone said she’d ask a team to come that same day. The two-man team came the next day after 5 p.m. I activated the switch for them and moved the door up and down. I told them that for several days the door balked at going down and sometimes stopped closing when it reached the top of the doorway. The lead man, noticing my veteran cap, said he would give me a discount on the trip-charge because I was a veteran. I responded that his company had just installed the door less than three months before, and wasn’t there a warranty that applied? He then stated I would owe nothing today. He began inspecting the rails and told his partner he wanted to be sure that there was no problem with the wires connecting to the photo eyes at the bottom corners of the door (though the lights were working on each). He unscrewed, cut, and stripped the ends of those wires, then reattached them as they had been. He and his partner sprayed WD-40 on every moving part of the door (hinges, rollers, roller bearings, torsion springs, cable drums, chain belt connecting the door to the operator). We then opened and closed the door a couple of times. He asked if there was anything else I needed them to do. I replied, “I want to be sure you understand that we had no problem with the door closing until the weather got so cold the last few days.” He said, “In that case, I know what I need to do.” He placed a ladder under the operator in the middle of the ceiling, quickly adjusted a dial on the back of it, and folded the ladder. I thanked them. As he and his partner walked to their truck, he again told me that I owed nothing . A few days later I received in the mail an invoice from All American Doors for $75.00. It said, “Work Performed: Rewired photo cells on operator” and “Operator is not covered under warranty for new door installed.” Right away I called All American Door. The woman said that because the operator was worked on, the installation warranty did not apply. To support her reasoning that the installation had any relation to the door’s malfunction, she said, “It worked fine for three-months.” I told her I thought something wasn’t right. My actual words were, “I’m not buyin’ it.” She said one of the owners would call me in the morning. No one ever called. (All my phones record caller IDs.) The amount of the invoice is no biggie. The two things that, taken together, irk me about this transaction are these: (1) Their technician clearly told me, not once, but twice, that I would not be charged. (2) An owner never called me as promised. It’s not certain what made the malfunction go away. The techs did many things not shown on the invoice that may have helped remedy the problem. An implication of the company’s actions is this: Even if a warranty on a garage-door installation ever were, without question, to apply, and management perceives that their worker did anything at all to the “operator system” (like, cut and re-attach one or more wires), the warranty disappears, POOF!

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