I am glad that many of you have had good experiences with Ideal Door, but unfortunately my experience is very bad. I recently bought three of their highest R value doors in a 9 by 9 size. They were shipped on a giant pallet with a 16 foot door on the bottom for someone else. This caused Menards to store it outside at the top of their pallet racking to allow for the crazy length. Menards sent me a notification that my doors were there as soon as they came in. I come in and find them up on top of this racking and after it took a couple of people to get them down without dropping/bending them, they basically said, "Go ahead, unpack it and load it in your truck." I started unpacking it and discovered that it was actually three different orders. Lovely. So they send people out to help me and we loaded all that would fit in my truck. One of the guys says "Let's call it a night. You come back tomorrow and we will have it all sorted out." Yeah. I come back the next day and all they have done is stick the pallet back up on the top of the racking. So more forking it down and trying to sort through it. What a mess. Now admittedly, the Menards goofs were not IdealDoor's fault but the packaging was. But I had my doors so I left. Now I had ordered a lot of options. The 9 by 9 size, considered to be a tall door, High lift track, High R value, W1 wind rating, etc. I start assembling the first door and I am confused by the seeming lack of high lift. It looks pretty much like any other door. I compared it to my other 2 garages and the new door's tracks are about 6-8 inches higher than my standard doors. Not exactly the 14" I was supposed to get. So I just keep going and get that first door up against the wall, tracks all installed, etc. I go to install the torsion springs and the cables are hilariously long. They wrap more than four times around the hubs before they even take up the slack. This places the cable right up against the edge of the door so it will be in constant contact with the door, scratching it and making excessive noise. Neither of my other doors are like that either.
These are "High Lift" hubs that are configured differently than normal hubs. The first couple of winds around the hub are a larger diameter than the rest of the hub is. I found an explanation on-line that says that this larger diameter section is used to get the door started and once it is moving and starting to transfer some of it's weight to the horizontal part of the track the cable will now be on the smaller diameter of the hub for the rest of the lift. Well, since my cables literally wrap around the hubs 4 times before taking up the slack, this High Lift hub is effectively a normal hub because that larger diameter space is already used by the extra cable before the door moves.
Ideal Door says this is all as it should be, The lift (or lack of) is normal, the excessively long cable, the multiple wraps on the high lift hub, all of this is as designed and they have nothing they can do for me. There is no offer of advice indicating maybe I have done something wrong, or there is a work around, or... anything. Pretty much too bad for you. They did indicate that I probably want a 21" lift and that this can be ordered from Menards. One thing for sure is I am not giving them any more of my money.
And I still have two more of these doors to install.
I have a local garage door professional coming out to see this mess and help me figure out where to go from here. If he can supply the parts to get these doors installed properly I will pay him to finish this garage door install and sell me the extra parts so I can finish the other two the same way on my own.
I wish my experience was similar to the others on here, but all I can say is buyer beware. These guys have shown no interest whatsoever in helping me get the right parts for these doors.
