How older sliders fail
There is a predictable sequence, and it is worth knowing where on it you are before anyone quotes you.
The rollers go first. A large panel is heavy, and decades of it rolling on a bearing designed in the 1970s wears the track. The door gets harder to move, then starts to drag, then needs a shoulder. Most people live with this stage for years.
Then the weatherseal hardens. Gaskets lose their compression set, the door stops sealing on all four edges, and conditioned air starts leaving the building. On the Gulf coast this is expensive long before it is noticeable, because it runs during the cooling season, which is most of the year.
Then the frame goes. Older aluminum was often not thermally broken and frequently not properly finished at the sill, so water sits where the drainage has silted up and the metal pits. Once that starts, the frame is at the end of its life and no amount of hardware will bring it back.
Can it go back in the same opening?
Usually, yes. Most replacements we do in Houston go into the existing structural opening with no work to the lintel or header. The things we check at survey are whether we can hold the head height with the new frame depth, whether the sill can take a flush threshold or needs a small upstand, and whether the opening is square enough to take a system with this little tolerance in it.
Where an opening is being widened as part of a renovation, that becomes a structural job and we work to the engineer's drawings. It is a bigger project, but it is also the moment to do it — widening later means doing the whole thing twice.
Repair, reglaze, or replace
Three genuinely different jobs, and it is worth being clear which you need.
- Repair — the frame and glass are sound and only the rollers or hardware have worn. Cheapest by far, and if that is what you need we will say so.
- Reglaze — the frame is sound but a sealed unit has failed, usually showing as misting between the panes. Worth doing where the frame has years left in it.
- Replace — the frame is corroded, not thermally broken, or the door has failed in more than one way at once. Replacing the glass in a dying frame is money spent twice.
What a proper replacement includes
Survey of the structural opening with dimensions taken to the millimeter, written confirmation of configuration, glazing specification and finish before anything is ordered, removal and disposal of the old door, installation into the prepared opening, and calibration on site so the panels move correctly and seal on all four edges.
The calibration is the part most often skipped and the part that determines whether you are happy in year three. A slim-frame system has very little tolerance in it by design — that is what makes the sightline possible — and it has to be set up properly rather than pushed into place.
Who does the work
Ask this before you ask about price. A great many suppliers in this category sell through a dealer network and subcontract the installation, which means the person who quoted you is not the person who fits it, and neither is the person you call when it needs adjusting. We install with our own team across Houston, Dallas–Fort Worth, Austin and San Antonio, which is the whole reason we can be held to the standard above.