Faraday Door & Power · Cold Harbor Bend & Tyee Ridge · Outages expected since 1999
When the grid goes down for four days, the garage still opens.
Faraday hangs doors that treat a power cut as a schedule, not an emergency — battery backup holding forty cycles, a solar-topped operator that trickles its own charge, a hand-crank any adult in the house can turn, and R-16 to R-18 shells that keep the room above habitable while the street is dark. The ridge loses power every winter. Your garage never has to notice.
What the ridge actually winters
The outage math, up front
The Backup
$599fitted, any door
- Battery backup module, forty cycles per charge
- Hand-crank release any adult in the house can turn
- The 20-point readiness tune — springs, cables, eyes
- The dark test: breaker off, door opens, witnessed
- Works on the opener and door you already own
The Ready home
from $2,860installed
- R-16 insulated shell, thermal-broken rails
- Solar-topped belt operator, self-charging
- Battery backup and hand-crank, both standard
- 50,000-cycle pair wound to the weighed door
- Fridge, freezer or CPAP circuit advisory included
- The dark test at handover, breaker and all
The Off-grid shop
from $4,150installed
- R-18 shell over rooms people work and sleep in
- Jackshaft solar operator — no rail, no ceiling
- Deep-cycle battery bank, eight days of openings
- Wind-rated track for the exposed yard faces
- Wired for the generator changeover, labelled
Added at the visit, never at the driveway
The readiness card — parts with printed prices
Everything below bolts to the door and operator you already own unless the shell itself is the project. Printed, fixed, and the same at the dark end of December as on a bright June quote.
Battery backup module, fitted$189
Forty cycles per charge · low-battery chirp that actually means it
Solar-topped operator, fitted$1,240
Self-charging off the shop light · belt drive, under sixty decibels
Hand-crank release kit, fitted$148
Full open in under a minute · any adult in the house, no strength test
Deep-cycle bank, the off-grid optionfrom $760
Eight days of openings · wired, fused, labelled for the generator
R-16 shell upgrade over R-9+$240
The difference the room above the garage feels through the ceiling
The 20-point readiness tune$96
Springs, cables, rollers, photo-eyes, force profile, battery on the meter
The readiness visit
We read your road’s outage history, not a brochure: how many dark days a winter, how long the longest, what the house needs moving in and out of the garage when it happens.
The load math
Openings per outage-day, cycles per charge, the math for a ninety-six-hour winter. If the backup covers your worst week on paper, it covers it in the snow.
The install day
Shell, operator, battery and crank fitted in one visit; every circuit labelled, every breaker named on the panel beside the door, nothing left for a February memory.
The dark test
Breaker off at the panel — you throw it. The door opens on battery, the crank turns without a fight, and the card you sign carries the cycle count we measured.
How the visit runs
Readiness is a schedule, not a promise
Every ridge house we serve gets the same four movements, because an outage is the one appointment the weather keeps for you. The visit ends with numbers you can hold: cycles, days, minutes to crank — and the dark test proves them with the breaker in your hand.
Forty cycles, or the battery is ours to replace
If a fitted backup delivers fewer than its rated cycles in a real outage, the replacement battery and the visit are on us. The rating is on the card you signed at the dark test, in the same ink as the price.
Outage seasons, photographed
Doors that answered the dark
Six ridge houses that opened every morning of every outage since we fitted them — photographed on bright days, because the dark days were spent being useful.
Forty cycles, proven
The battery is rated in open-close cycles and the rating is tested at your panel with the breaker off. The number on your card is the number the meter read — not the number the box claims.
The crank never needs a subscription
Every system we fit turns by hand: one crank, any adult, full open in under a minute, forever. Preparedness that stops working when a bill goes unpaid is a rental, not a plan.
The room above stays habitable
R-16 minimum where a ceiling is shared, R-18 over sleeping space, thermal-broken rails throughout — because an outage week with a cold bedroom above the garage is a failure we can design out.
Ninety-six hours in January, wind taking the lines down twice, and the garage opened for the truck, the wood splitter and the school run on battery the whole way through. The dark test at install felt like theatre. Ninety-six hours later it felt like the most honest sales call of my life.
My husband travels and the crank was the reason I said yes — I can open that door myself, in the dark, in a parka, in under a minute. They made me do it at the panel with the breaker off before they would take the cheque. I have never trusted a tradesperson faster.
The CPAP advisory was the detail nobody else asked about: which circuit the machine rides, what the door’s share of the battery really is, whether the generator changeover covers both. They labelled the panel and left the math on the wall. February came. The math held.
The five the ridge asks
Questions before the lights go out
The five every ridge house asks before the first freeze. The shop line answers the rest between seven and six — and by the line we mean the phone beside a panel where somebody has already thrown a breaker this week.
What does a battery backup actually cover?
The opener and its safety systems, for about forty open-close cycles on a full charge — enough for a week of normal comings and goings, or the length of the longest outage this ridge has thrown at our clients. It does not run the freezer; that is the generator’s job, and the readiness visit maps which circuits ride on what so nothing is discovered in the dark.
Why solar on a garage door operator?
Because the operator draws almost nothing — a few watt-hours a cycle — and a small panel over the shop light keeps the battery topped without adding a circuit or a bill. It is the cheapest independence in the house: no fuel, no maintenance, and it charges on exactly the grey daylight an outage week still gives you.
R-16, R-18 — what is the honest difference?
R-value measures how hard heat finds it to cross the door, and each doubling roughly halves what escapes. R-16 is the standard where the garage shares a ceiling with living space; R-18 is for the rooms people sleep and work in through an outage week, when the furnace may be cycling on generator minimums and every surface matters.
Can you fit this to the door and opener I already own?
Usually, yes — the battery module and crank kit bolt to most openers made in the last twenty years, and the tune that comes with them tells you honestly whether the springs have the cycles left to be worth backing up. Where the opener is beyond help we say so and quote the belt-drive replacement that carries its own battery standard.
What happens if the battery dies mid-outage?
The hand-crank takes over — one crank, any adult in the house, full open in under a minute, no strength test, no electricity, forever. And the low-battery warning chirps weeks before the dark week arrives, not during it, because we test the chirp at the tune like everything else.
Readiness visits across the ridge before the first freeze · (555) 163-9024 · ready@faradaydoor.example · the dark test is included, breaker in your hand
Book the readiness visit
Your road, your opener, and how many dark days your household needs the garage through — that is the whole visit, and it ends with numbers on a card and a breaker in your hand. ready@faradaydoor.example