Why “annual” means something different here
National maintenance advice assumes mild weather. Riverside lubricant evaporates by late summer; dust season packs grit into tracks and bearings; and the garage-as-front-door household stacks up cycles twice as fast as the advice assumes. A tune-up here isn’t a courtesy — it’s the arithmetic that decides whether builder hardware dies in year five or year ten.
What the visit actually covers
Every moving point gets lubricated with heat-rated product. Every bolt and bracket gets torqued — vibration loosens them steadily. Tracks get checked plumb and parallel. Springs get a balance test and a fatigue read. Cables get inspected strand by strand. The opener gets force and travel calibration plus a sensor alignment check. It’s an hour that buys years — and it catches the frayed cable before it becomes the off-track door.
The math nobody regrets
A tune-up costs a fraction of a spring emergency, and a fraction of a fraction of an opener replacement. The households that never meet us at 7 a.m. with a trapped car are, overwhelmingly, the households on a yearly schedule. The won’t-open triage post shows what the neglected version looks like.