Depending on which part of the city you are calling from, your garage is a building at the back of the lot, a room underneath the house, or a shared ramp you reach on a fob. We are a licensed mobile locksmith covering garage doors, openers and garage locks, and the truck comes to whichever of those is yours.
Three faults account for nearly every garage call here: the door binding or coming off its track, the opener refusing to finish a cycle, and a garage with nothing on it that actually holds shut. One licensed technician carries parts for all three, so a call that turns out to be two of them is still one visit.
The older Vancouver grid runs a service lane behind the block, and on the east side that is where the garage sits: its own building at the back of the lot, door facing the lane, a block off the address on your mail. West of Main the car comes in from the street instead, down a driveway to a garage attached to the house or dug in underneath it. On the peninsula, through Yaletown and up the Cambie Corridor there is no private garage in the picture at all, only a ramp and an overhead gate shared by everyone in the building.
This page routes the work. Repair, opener faults and garage locks each have a page of their own below, carrying the fault lists and the parts. What stays here is the part common to all three: what rides on the truck, what the usual jobs cost, and the handful of things worth saying on the phone so a technician arrives at the right door with the right hardware in hand.
| Job | Typical range |
|---|---|
| Replacement remote or keypad, programmed on site | $40–$140 |
| Photo-eye realignment or small opener adjustment | $90–$200 |
| Deadbolt on the walk-in side door | $120–$280 |
| T-handle or slide lock on a manual overhead door | $110–$260 |
| Minor roller, hinge or track work | $120–$320 |
| Opener repair: drive gear, limit switch or logic board | $140–$360 |
| New opener unit, supplied and fitted | $300–$650 |
Parts and labour together, on the jobs that come up most often at Vancouver addresses. Heavier structural work sits outside these figures and is quoted once somebody has looked at the door. Describe the symptom on the phone and the range narrows before anyone is dispatched, and the number you are given is the number you pay.
Detached on a lane, attached at the end of a driveway, or a shared parkade under a strata building. Then what the door is doing. That is enough for a price range on the call, and it settles whether opener parts, lock hardware or both come out of the van.
A lane carries no street numbers, and a long west-side driveway can hide the one it has. Give the house address, the nearest cross street, and which side of the lane the garage is on. Tell us if a car has to move before there is room to work at the door.
The door gets cycled under its own power, the lock gets thrown with the door down, and every remote and keypad in the house is tried against it. Anything nobody can account for is cleared from the opener before we leave.
A garage on a lane changes the visit more than the fault does. In Hastings-Sunrise the post-war bungalows along Parker, Graveley, Kitchener and William sit on standard 33-foot lots, which leaves the garage pressed up against the lane with very little room to either side of the door. We work from the lane itself, so the truck needs a clear run at it and whatever is parked in front of the door moves before anything else happens.
The other thing to settle before booking is where that lane is, because lanes carry no numbers of their own and a garage mid-block looks like every other garage on the run. The house address, the nearest cross street and which side of the lane you are on covers it. If the lane is narrow, or a bin or a car is sitting at the door, that is worth saying when you call.
The version of this call that cannot wait until morning is a door that has gone up and will not come back down. On a lane that is worse than it sounds, because a lane is a through route: it carries the bins, the deliveries and everyone cutting between two streets, and an open garage on it is a lit room facing all of that. The order of operations is to secure the opening tonight and diagnose the fault in daylight.
Pull the manual release cord first. It disconnects the door from the opener trolley so the door can be brought down by hand, and it is the one part of the system worth finding before you ever need it. With the door down, the slide lock or T-handle holds it there, and a deadbolt on the walk-in side door means the garage is genuinely shut rather than merely closed. Why the opener stopped listening is a separate question, and the opener repair page goes through the usual culprits.
Nobody gets locked out of an overhead door. The one that produces a lockout is the pass-through behind it: a hinged walk-in at the back of a garage attached to the house, or built in underneath it and reached by a driveway off the street, with a cylinder in it and the house on the other side. Garage-door pass-through locks are named on the Dunbar callout list for that reason, and they are the door people are actually standing at when they call. Say which one you mean and both sets of hardware come out of the van.
An under-house garage out there often shares its level with a basement suite or a garden suite, which puts the garage walk-in door and a separate dwelling entrance a few steps apart. Count both when you call so the right number of cylinders is on the truck. Shaughnessy adds a different problem, which is finding the door at all: the streets curve, the driveways are long, and a garage at the end of one is not visible from the road. Say whether it is down a side drive or behind a closed gate when you book.
Most of the peninsula has no private garage door on it. What the towers along Burrard, Hornby and Nelson have, along with the Yaletown buildings off Marinaside Crescent and the Cambie Corridor mid-rises through Fairview, is a ramp with a gate at the top of it, and that gate is common property. Work on the ramp, the gate and the system that lifts it is ordered by the strata council or the building manager rather than by a resident, and quoted to them. Anything on the far side of your own suite door is a different job on a different page: see residential locksmith.
The three jobs behind nearly every garage call, each on its own page with the fault list, the prices and how the visit runs.
The garage is one door on the property. The same licensed technician and the same truck handle the rest of them.
Pick-, drill- and bump-resistant cylinders with keys that can’t be copied at the hardware store. Cut, pinned and registered in-shop.
Residential Security Container (RSC) burglary classification: a key-locked security container designed to provide entry…
Car keys are priced by vehicle. Pick what you need and we’ll collect your make, model & year to text you an exact quote.