Motorized Screen Repair & Rescreening

Motorized screens are wonderfully simple machines right up until they aren’t. One morning the screen that dropped every evening for years just… doesn’t. No sound, no movement, and a patio door’s worth of afternoon sun pouring straight into the house. Or it moves, but it creeps, stalls halfway, and leaves you staring at a half-lowered screen you can’t coax up or down. Most of these failures are repairable, and most are cheaper to fix than homeowners fear, because the expensive parts of the system, the housing and tracks, are usually fine.

Start with the failure you actually have, because motorized screens fail in predictable ways. A screen that does nothing at all, no hum, no click, is almost always power, remote, or receiver: breaker, outlet, battery, pairing. A screen that hums or clicks but won’t travel, or travels partway and gives up, is pointing at the motor or its limit settings. A screen that binds, pops out of its track, or moves jerkily is a mechanical problem, rails, alignment, debris, and forcing it only makes it worse. When you call us, tell us which one you’re seeing, and we’ll show up with the right parts the first time.

Motor replacement is our most common screen repair, and it’s straightforward when the rest of the system is sound: the failed motor comes out, a quiet modern unit goes in, and the travel limits get reprogrammed so the screen stops exactly at top and bottom. While we’re in there we check the fabric and tracks, because a motor that died straining against a jammed track will kill its replacement the same way. We fix the cause, not just the symptom. If your screens run on older controls, see our Somfy automation options, a repair visit is a good moment to bring the whole setup up to current smart-home standards.

Torn or sun-rotted fabric is the other big one, and it’s the repair with the best return: we strip the damaged fabric and re-screen your existing housing with premium solar fabric in the openness factor that fits the opening, 1% where heat is brutal, 5% where you want the view preserved. The cut is exact, the fabric seats properly in the tracks, and the screen seals the way it did when it was new. Pets, wind-blown debris, and a decade of UV are the usual culprits, and none of them require a new system.

Then there’s storm damage. Screens left lowered through a Santa Ana event take the full force of the wind, bent side tracks, stretched fabric, housings pulled at their mounts. If your screen survived a windstorm but now jams or won’t seal, don’t keep running it: every jammed cycle grinds the problem deeper. We straighten and re-level tracks, re-secure mountings, replace damaged fabric, and re-test full travel before we leave. For the full pre-season routine, our storm prep checklist covers how to protect both awnings and screens before wind season.

Here’s what the estimate visit looks like. We come out for free, run the whole system, housing, tracks, fabric, motor, controls, sensors, and tell you the repair number and the replacement number side by side, in writing. Then we recommend whichever one we’d pick if it were our patio. Most of our repair work comes from referrals, and referrals only happen when the advice is straight. Second opinions are always free, if someone else’s quote is fair, we’ll say so.

A word about older systems: if your screen’s manufacturer is gone and parts are genuinely unobtainable, we’ll tell you that at the estimate instead of billing you for a diagnosis that goes nowhere. Many orphan systems can be adapted with modern components, we’ve saved plenty, but when they can’t, you deserve the replacement conversation up front. And when replacement is the answer, our new motorized screens are custom-built, Somfy-powered, and backed by our 15-year warranty, which no repair can offer. Honest judgment, either way, that’s the job.