The door for low headroom and hard wind
A roll-up garage door is a curtain of interlocking aluminium slats that coils into a barrel mounted above the opening. There are no ceiling tracks, no panels lying flat across the garage roof, and no panel swinging out into the driveway — the door goes straight up into its own housing and the garage ceiling stays clear. That makes it the answer for two kinds of Cape Town garage: the one with almost no headroom, where a sectional's tracks will not fit, and the one used as a workshop or storage, where the ceiling space a sectional takes up is space that is needed.
It is also the door that handles wind. A roll-up curtain runs in guides either side of the opening along its whole height, and the wind loads on the West Coast — Table View, Blouberg, Melkbos — that rattle and stress a sectional's panels are carried into the guides on a roll-up. That is why the West Coast is full of them, and why a roll-up is the first door to consider on any opening that faces the south-easter.
What a roll-up needs from the garage
Space above the opening for the barrel — roughly three to four hundred millimetres, depending on the door height, since a taller door coils into a bigger roll. Side room for the guides. A lintel that can carry the barrel and the door's weight, because everything hangs from it. And no obstruction in the opening's top corners where the barrel brackets sit. What it does not need is depth into the garage, which is the whole point.
On the measuring visit those numbers are taken and the door is quoted for the opening, and where a roll-up's barrel will not fit above the opening — a garage with a very low lintel — the honest answer may be a tip-up, which needs no space above the opening at all. Installation sets out how the three types are chosen; this page assumes a roll-up is the fit.
Slats, guides and the West Coast
The weakness of a roll-up is the thing that makes it strong: the guides. The curtain runs in a channel either side of the opening, and anything that gets into that channel — sand, grit, salt crust — wears the slat edges and the guide, and eventually the curtain binds and the motor strains. On the West Coast that is sand, and a roll-up in Blouberg or Sunningdale that has never had its guides cleared is a door that will start sticking on a windy week. Clearing and lubricating the guides with the right lubricant — one that does not attract more sand — is the maintenance a coastal roll-up needs, and it is done on every service visit.
The slats are aluminium, which does not rust, but the guides, the barrel and the fixings are steel, and on a door facing the sea they are specified in stainless or coated steel. Insulated slats — a foam core between two aluminium skins — are available and are worth having on a garage under living space, and single-skin slats are fine on a detached garage.
The motor for a roll-up
Roll-ups do not use a ceiling rail. The motor is tubular and sits inside the barrel, turning it to coil and uncoil the curtain, and it is sized by the barrel diameter and the door's weight. That means the motor is out of sight, quiet, and protected from the weather — and that a failed one is replaced inside the barrel rather than on a rail. It also means a roll-up motor that has been fitted undersized shows itself as a door that slows or stalls near the top of its travel, where the coiled weight is greatest, and the fix is a correctly rated tubular motor, not a repair to the undersized one.
Garage door automation covers the sizing; safety beams, force limits and rolling-code remotes are fitted and set as standard, and a manual override — a crank or a release — is fitted so the door can be operated in a power cut.
Living with a roll-up
Keep the guides clean and the bottom slat's seal intact, and a roll-up is a long-lived door. The things that fail are the tubular motor at the end of its life, the bottom slat where it takes the weather, and the guides where grit has been allowed to accumulate. The curtain itself rarely needs replacing; individual slats can be, where one has been dented by a bumper or bent by a jam, without touching the rest of the door. A roll-up that has started to bind or scrape is a guide problem before it is a motor problem, and a motor repair diagnosis on a roll-up starts at the guides for that reason.