Every fix your sliding doors and windows need — under one roof

What is your door doing, and which repair does it need?

Most people arrive here knowing the symptom, not the part. Match what your door is doing to the repair that owns it, and you will know what you are booking before you call.

• Heavy, grinding, jumping the track, or leaving fine aluminum shavings behind. That is the rollers almost every time. Start at roller replacement, or read the signs your rollers are finished.
• Gritty, crunching travel, or water standing in the bottom track after rain. That is track and drainage work, not parts. See maintenance and tune-ups and the track cleaning guide.
• The latch only catches if you lift or lean on the panel. The door has dropped and the lock is missing its keeper. See security locks and why a slider stops locking.
• Mesh torn, sagging, or powdery to the touch. The frame is usually fine and only the fabric needs replacing. See screen fabric repair.
• A broken pane, or glass you can no longer get clear. Start at glass clean-up.
• Drafts, condensation at the edges, cooling bills creeping up. Usually alignment and seal rather than glass. See the energy guide.

Sliding windows fail the same way and get the same treatment, so include them when you describe the job.

If two or three of those describe your door, that is normal. One failure drags the next one along: worn rollers drop the panel, the dropped panel misses the lock, and the sagging panel grinds the track. Tell us every symptom and we will work out the order to fix them in.

Should you repair your sliding glass door, or replace it?

We are a repair company, so treat this section as us arguing against our own invoice where it is warranted.

Repair wins in the large majority of the doors we see. A slider is a frame, a panel, glass, rollers, a track and a lock, and every one of those except the frame and the glass is a serviceable part. A door that has been fought with for two years usually needs rollers, a track dressed or capped, and a lock realigned, and it comes back to one-finger operation for a fraction of a replacement.

Replacement genuinely wins in four cases, and we will say so on site:

• The frame or sill is structurally gone. Corroded through at the bottom rail, or a rail split where the roller housing seats. If the housing has nothing sound to bite into, new rollers will not hold adjustment for long.
• The failures have stacked on a very old door. Rollers, track, lock, a failed glass seal and a bent panel on one 40-year-old aluminum unit. Add those up honestly and the repair approaches the price of a door.
• You want performance the door was never built to give. No repair converts single-pane glass into impact glass, and no adjustment turns a 1980s frame into a modern thermal one. If wind rating or insulation is the goal, that is a replacement decision, not a repair one.
• The parts have genuinely run out. Some obsolete hardware can be matched by pattern; some cannot. When it cannot, we tell you rather than fitting something that half fits.

What we will not do is call a repairable door dead. A cloudy pane, a torn screen, a heavy panel and a lock that misses are all repairs, not reasons to buy a door. If you want the arithmetic in detail, the cost guide lays it out, and choosing a door covers what to look for if replacement really is the answer.

What does your door's build era tell you about what will fail?

Treasure Coast housing came in waves, and each wave put a different door in the wall. Knowing roughly when your house was built tells us what to expect before we arrive.

• 1970s and early 80s aluminum. Mill-finish frames, thin rails, single-pane glass, and single rollers in a stamped housing. These doors were light, so the panel is rarely the problem. The sill wear and the seized adjustment screws are, and the mortise lock bodies from this era are often past reviving. This is the era where replacement starts to compete on honest numbers.
• The 1998 to 2006 boom build. Structurally sound doors, fitted at volume with the cheapest hardware in the catalog. Nylon-wheeled tandem rollers on an aluminum sill, often on wide multi-panel lanai openings. These doors are not worn out, they are simply past the service life of a twenty-dollar part, and they make up a large share of what we repair.
• Post-2005 impact doors. Laminated glass roughly doubles or triples panel weight. The frame and glass outlast everything, but the weight drives roller wear hard and the panel drops just enough to miss the keeper, so the lock is usually the first complaint. These doors need heavy-rated rollers. A light replacement wheel fitted to an impact panel fails inside a year.

The one thing every era shares is the environment. Salt aerosol settles on the hardware and, being hygroscopic, holds a damp chloride film on metal even on dry days. That film attacks the passive layer inside a bearing race where nothing ever rinses it, and it turns a steel component sitting in an aluminum track into a small galvanic cell. Add quartz sand, which is harder than aluminum, and every pass of the door laps the surface it rides on. The details are in why Florida doors stick.

Who is responsible for a sliding door in a condo or HOA building?

This is the question that stalls more balcony sliders than any failure we see. The answer is not fairness and it is not what the neighbor did. It is your declaration.

Three questions settle it, in this order:

• Where does your unit boundary sit? Most declarations draw it at the unfinished interior surface of the perimeter wall, which puts the opening itself on the building side of the line.
• How is the door classified? A balcony slider is often a limited common element, meaning it serves your unit alone but belongs to the building. That classification does not decide who pays. The maintenance article does.
• What does the maintenance article assign to the owner? Plenty of Florida declarations hand glass, screens and door hardware to the unit owner while keeping the frame and envelope with the association, and plenty do the reverse. Read the article rather than assuming.

Two more points worth knowing. Insurance responsibility and maintenance responsibility are separate questions with separate answers. And anything that changes the look of the door from outside, including a visible auxiliary lock or a different frame finish, usually needs architectural approval before the work, not after it.

Tell us at booking that it is a condo or an association building, and mention any building rules on working hours or elevator use, so the visit is planned around them. The full walkthrough is in who is responsible for a condo sliding door.

What happens to a slider in a seasonal home while you are away?

Snowbird doors do not fail in season. They fail over the summer, in an empty house, and the owner meets the result in November.

The mechanism is simple. A door that never moves for five months keeps its rollers parked on the same two contact points. The salt film on the hardware stays damp through a humid summer, corrosion products build in the bearing race, and the wheel effectively bonds to its axle at the spot it was resting. Meanwhile the track collects pollen, leaf litter and blown sand through storm season, the weep holes silt up, water sits in the sill instead of draining, and the gasket takes a permanent set against the jamb.

Then someone opens the house and gives the stuck door one hard shove. That is the shove that gouges the track and turns a roller job into a track job.

Two habits prevent nearly all of it. Have someone slide every door in the house a few times a month while you are gone, which keeps the bearings from setting and the gasket from bonding. And book the service either just before you close up or in the first weeks after you return, before the door is forced. Seasonal owners commonly arrange access through family, a neighbor or a property manager, and that works fine on our end.

Rental and second-home owners will also want the rental property checklist, which covers what to hand a manager between guests.

How does a service call work, from your call to a door that glides?

Four steps, and no surprises in the middle of them.

• The call. Describe the symptom in plain terms: heavy, grinding, will not lock, torn screen. Tell us how many doors and roughly how old the house is, because that decides what we load on the truck.
• The inspection. On arrival we check the whole system, not the one part you called about. Rollers, track, sill, frame, lock and keeper, screen, and how the panel sits in the opening. A door that will not lock is usually a roller problem wearing a lock costume.
• The number, before the work. You get told what it needs, what it will cost, and what is optional. If part of it can wait, we say which part. If a repair is not the right call, we say that instead.
• The work and the glide test. Panel out where required, parts in, track cleaned and dressed, panel re-hung and adjusted, lock checked against the keeper. Then you slide it yourself before we pack up. Same-day service is available, and 96% of our jobs are finished in a single visit.

Repairs start at $275, which includes parts, labor and a written 1 to 3 year warranty on both. If we have to come back inside that window for the same fault, that is our problem, not yours.

Where does SliderPro work across the Treasure Coast?

We cover fourteen cities across six counties, from Orlando in Orange County and Brevard County in the north, down through Indian River, St. Lucie and Martin to northern Palm Beach County.

• Port St. Lucie and Fort Pierce
• Stuart, Jensen Beach, Palm City, Port Salerno and Hobe Sound
• Vero Beach
• Jupiter and Palm Beach Gardens

Address matters more than city limits here. An oceanfront condo, a canal-front house on the Intracoastal and a home a few miles inland get measurably different salt exposure, which changes both what fails and how soon it comes back. Each city page covers the housing stock and the exposure in that town, and our service areas page lists the whole coverage map.