Sectional, roll-up or tip-up: which garage door suits a Cape Town garage
Sectional, roll-up or tip-up: what each needs in headroom and driveway, how each handles Cape Town wind and salt, and which suits the garage you actually have.
Three doors, three ways of moving
A sectional door is horizontal panels hinged together, running on rollers up vertical tracks and then back along the ceiling. A roll-up door is a curtain of narrow slats coiling around a barrel above the opening. A tip-up door is one rigid panel pivoting on side arms, swinging out and up. Each needs something different from the garage it goes into, and the garage you actually have — not the brochure — decides which is right.
What each needs from the garage
A sectional needs headroom above the opening for the tracks and spring, and depth along the ceiling for the door to lie flat when open. Standard track needs around 300mm of headroom; low-headroom kits get it down to about 150mm at a cost. A roll-up needs headroom for the barrel — about 300mm — and nothing along the ceiling, which is why it goes into garages where a sectional cannot. A tip-up needs very little headroom but needs room outside for the panel to swing through, which means a driveway long enough that a parked car is not in the way.
That last point is why so many Claremont and Gardens tip-ups have been replaced: the door was fine, the driveway was not.
Wind
Cape Town's south-easter decides a lot of doors. A sectional's panels present a large flat face to the wind, and on an exposed door in Table View or Higgovale the panels rattle, the hinges stress and the brackets work loose over years. A roll-up's curtain sits in guides either side and carries the wind into the wall; it is the door the West Coast fitted for that reason. A tip-up is the worst in wind — a single large panel on two pivots — and a tip-up facing the south-easter is a door that gets caught mid-swing.
Salt
All three rust on the coast; they rust in different places. A sectional's bottom panel goes from its cut edge, and its many hinges and rollers are many small parts to corrode — but each is individually replaceable, and a sectional can be made coastal-rated one part at a time. A roll-up's slats and guides corrode at the contact surfaces, and sand in the guides is the West Coast's particular problem. A tip-up in steel is the fewest parts and the simplest to keep, and in timber it does not rust at all, though it swells in the damp.
Insulation, appearance and noise
A sectional can be double-skinned and insulated, which matters for a garage under a bedroom or one used as a workshop. A roll-up is a single steel skin and is neither insulated nor quiet. A tip-up can be anything — steel, aluminium, timber, glass-panelled — and is the door for a heritage frontage in Tamboerskloof or Bo-Kaap where the street has a view on what the door looks like.
Automation
All three automate. A sectional and a roll-up take a standard rail or tubular motor. A tip-up takes a motor with an arm designed for a swinging panel, and automating an existing tip-up in place is far cheaper than replacing it with a sectional to get a motor. A motor sized for the door is the rule for all three, and a developer-grade motor on a double sectional is the commonest failure in the city.
Which one, then
A standard suburban garage with headroom and depth: a sectional, insulated if there is a room above. A garage with headroom but no ceiling depth, a narrow converted opening, or an exposed West Coast door: a roll-up. A heritage frontage, a long driveway, or an existing timber door worth keeping: a tip-up, automated in place. A garage cut into a slope with no headroom on one side: whichever fits the measured numbers, which is usually a roll-up. And in every case the measuring visit before any installation is what decides it, not this guide.