North Texas gets serious hail, and the garage door is the largest flat vertical surface on most houses in Plano and Frisco. It is also usually facing the street, which in a storm coming out of the west or north is exactly the wrong way.
So the morning after, a lot of doors look like a golf ball. The conversation that follows is almost always about whether it can be pulled out, and that is the second question. The first one decides whether it matters at all.
Two different findings that look the same from the curb
Cosmetic denting is deformation of the steel skin. The section is still straight along its length, still square, still rigid. The door runs exactly as it did. This is the overwhelming majority of hail damage and it is a purely aesthetic decision. Plenty of people simply live with it, quite reasonably.
A structural bend is a section that is no longer straight. You find it by closing the door and sighting down the face from one end, the way you would sight down a board. A bowed section binds in the tracks, wears the rollers on one side, and puts the whole door slightly out of square, and that costs you other parts over time.
Nobody can tell these apart from a photograph. If someone quotes a hail door without sighting down it, they have not made the distinction that matters.
Why insulated doors dent differently
Worth knowing before anyone starts talking about pulling dents out.
A single-skin steel door is a sheet with air behind it. The skin can flex, and a dent in it is a dent in a free panel.
A polyurethane-insulated door has foam injected between the skins and bonded to both. That makes the panel a composite and much stiffer, which is why it resists hail better in the first place. It also means there is nothing behind the skin to push against. Attempts at paintless dent removal on a foam-bonded panel generally end in delamination, which turns a cosmetic problem into a structural one.
Polystyrene-filled doors sit in between, since the board is not fully bonded across its face.
What actually needs checking after a hailstorm
The dents will still be there tomorrow. These will not wait.
- Sight down each section with the door closed. Straight or bowed.
- Look at the tracks from inside. A door driven inward by impact can move the track brackets. Check that every roller is in its track and that the tracks have not spread away from the door.
- Check the anchors. Lag bolts into the jamb that have started to withdraw mean the assembly took a real load.
- Run it once by hand. Pull the release, lift the door manually, and feel for a point where it catches. A bind you can feel by hand is a bind the opener will force its way through.
- Look at the top section specifically. It carries the opener bracket. A deformed top section transfers load into that bracket and it is the one that quietly comes loose over the following months.
Panel replacement, and the part that decides it
Replacing one section is mechanically straightforward on a healthy door. Unhinge it, slide it out, slide the new one in, re-hinge and re-roller.
Whether it is available to you is decided by a label, not by the damage. A replacement section has to match five things: the panel design, the section height, the construction and therefore the weight, the colour, and the hardware layout. Manufacturers revise designs, and a revision that looks identical in a catalogue can be visibly different bolted next to the original.
Match all five and it disappears. Miss one and you have a door with a patch on it.
The label is usually inside the end stile, the vertical steel at the edge of a section. Get that model number before anyone quotes you anything, because it is the entire question.
The insurance part, kept brief
Not our field, and two practical notes anyway.
Photograph the door before anything is touched, including the tracks and brackets from inside, and photograph the model label while you are there. A door that has been straightened is much harder to document afterwards.
And be aware that after a big DFW hail event there is a wave of people going door to door in the affected zip codes. Some are legitimate. The tell is simple: anyone who can identify your door’s model, sight down the sections and tell you which are actually bent is doing the work. Anyone quoting a full door from the driveway is not.
The money question
No prices, and on hail work you should be more suspicious of a quick number than pleased by it.
The range is set by whether the sections are straight, how many are damaged, and whether the model is still in production. One section on a current model is a predictable job. A discontinued line means sourced stock or an honest conversation about a full door. Two adjacent damaged sections on an older door is usually where the sums stop favouring the repair.
Add to that the track and bracket work, if the impact moved anything, which is labour rather than parts and is the part most likely to be left off a fast quote.
What not to buy
- Do not buy a new door for cosmetic dents. If the sections are straight and the door runs true, the only thing wrong with it is that you can see it.
- Do not buy dent removal on an insulated panel. There is nothing behind the skin to work against, and the usual result is a delaminated section.
- Do not buy from someone who has not read the model label. Without it nobody can promise a colour and profile match, and the match is the whole job.
- Do not buy a repainted single section as a colour match. Painting a whole door is legitimate. Painting one section to match seven weathered ones is a short-lived illusion.
The short version
Sight down the sections, check the track and the anchors, and read the label inside the end stile. Most hail-dented doors in this metro are structurally fine and the decision is purely about how it looks.
Which does mean a good number of our post-hail visits end with us telling somebody their door works perfectly and the dents are their call. It is not much of an invoice. It is the right answer.
Garage Doors Pro Service · (469) 693-9000 · garagedoorsproservice.com
Serving Dallas, Plano, Frisco, McKinney and the DFW metro.
