One Double Door or Two Singles

Two Ways to Cover the Same Garage

A two car garage can be closed by one wide door or by two narrow ones. Around Huntington Beach you will see both on the same street, sometimes on houses built by the same developer in the same year.

People usually decide this on appearance and then discover the rest afterwards. The rest is worth knowing first.

Cost, Honestly

One door is cheaper. A sixteen foot double needs one opener, one torsion spring set on one shaft, one pair of vertical tracks and one horizontal track set, and one installation visit.

Two singles need two openers, two spring sets, four vertical tracks, two horizontal track sets, two pairs of photo eyes for UL 325 entrapment protection, and more labour. In California both openers also have to carry battery backup, which has been required on residential openers sold or installed here since July of 2019 under SB-969.

As a rule of thumb a double lands somewhere near two thirds of what a matched pair costs. The gap widens if you want insulated doors, because the pair needs twice the insulated square footage.

Redundancy, Which Is What You Are Buying

When a torsion spring breaks on a sixteen foot door, the door is not going up. Both cars are parked behind it until somebody arrives with winding bars. If you have two doors, that same failure strands one car and leaves the other bay working normally.

Whether that is worth the extra money is a household question. Two people leaving for work at the same time feel it. One car and a workshop does not.

Weight and What It Does to the Hardware

A sixteen foot insulated steel door can pass four hundred pounds. That is not a problem in itself, but it changes the specification.

• The top section needs a strut across it, or the section bows where the opener arm pulls on it.
• Springs are sized to the actual weight, and a wide door often runs two springs on the shaft rather than one.
• The header above the opening carries the whole load through the end bearing plates and the centre bearing. On a wide door that concentrates a lot into one beam.
• Openers get worked harder. An eight foot door is a light load for the same motor.

An eight or nine foot single is the easy life version of all of the above.

The Matching Problem

This is the one people do not see coming. Two doors on one street elevation have to match exactly, and they only really do that if they were ordered together.

Order them as one batch and the panel embossing, the glazing pattern, the hardware and the paint all come from the same run. Replace one of them six years later and three things have moved: the profile may have been discontinued, the finish batch will be different, and the surviving door has spent six years fading in coastal sun. From the sidewalk it reads as two different doors.

So if you go with two singles, treat them as a pair for the rest of their life. When one is damaged badly enough to need replacing, price the pair.

Changing From One Arrangement to the Other

Both directions are structural work, not door work.

Going from one wide door to two singles means putting a real post between them, carrying header load down to the slab on a proper footing. A stud nailed to the ceiling is not that.

Going from two singles to one double means removing that post, which leaves the header spanning the entire width unaided. That needs a correctly sized beam and, in this city, a permit and an inspection.

We will tell you which one you are facing before you spend anything on doors.

Call Cultureconnectinc at (657) 794-9630.