# Our partners, and how GarageDude is funded Last reviewed: 2026-08-29 Reviewed by [The GarageDude Editorial Desk](https://garagedude.shop/authors/editorial-team/) GarageDude takes no money from garage door companies. The site is funded by a separate partner network in portable sanitation: when someone hires a porta potty rental company through one of the state links below, that company pays us a commission. The customer pays no more for it, and no garage door advice on this site is affected. ## Why a garage door site needs a funding model at all This site is not a hobby project that runs itself. It is maintained by a working team — editors who read the federal rules and the manufacturer service manuals, translators who rebuild every curated page in Spanish rather than machine-translating it, and engineers who keep the build, the accessibility gates and the safety checks passing. Behind that sits the unglamorous half: servers, the build pipeline, domain and certificate renewals, monitoring, backups, and the standing cost of keeping several thousand pages online and fast. None of that is free, and the ways most garage door sites cover it are exactly the ways that make their advice worthless. A site paid by repair companies has a reason to tell you the job is harder than it is. A site selling your details as a lead has a reason to collect them. Either one quietly turns every “call a professional” into a sales pitch, and every “you can fix this yourself in four minutes” into a line the site can no longer afford to publish. So our financial and technical people worked the problem together and landed somewhere deliberately boring: fund the garage door content from a business that has nothing to do with garage doors. The partner network below rents portable toilets. It shares our infrastructure and our team, it has no stake in what we say about springs, and it is the reason this site can keep telling you not to hire anyone. ## The disclosure, in plain terms Disclosure. GarageDude has affiliate relationships with the porta potty rental businesses linked on this page. When someone becomes a qualified customer of one of them, that business pays us a commission. It costs the customer nothing extra — the commission comes out of the business owner’s side of the transaction, not added to your price. You pay the same whether you reach them through this page or find them yourself. Two things follow from that, and both matter more than the commission does. The businesses on this page are in portable sanitation, not garage doors — if you came here about a door that will not close, none of these links will help you, and you should use the [symptom diagnoser](https://garagedude.shop/problems/) instead. And a commission is not an endorsement of any particular company: we are disclosing a financial relationship, not vouching for a contractor we have not inspected. ## What the money does not get to touch The value of this site is that its verdicts are believable, and a verdict is only believable if nothing is riding on the answer. So the funding is walled off from the editorial side by rules that are enforced by the build rather than by good intentions: - No partner or affiliate link ever appears on a spring, cable, drum or bottom-bracket page, or on any page whose verdict is “call a professional.” The build fails if one does. Those are the pages where someone is scared and about to spend money, and they are the last place a commercial link belongs. - No garage door company pays us anything. Not for a listing, not for a mention, not for a link. There is no directory to buy into. - We do not sell your details to a repair company. There is no phone number and no quote form on this site, and that absence is deliberate. - The DIY verdicts are set by published criteria and enforced automatically, so no commercial consideration can move a job from “safe to DIY” into “call a professional” or the other way round. Every one of those is checked on every build, across every page, in both languages. They are not promises we are asking you to take on trust; they are conditions the site has to satisfy before it can ship. ## How these links are marked Each state link below carries rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" . sponsored is the attribute Google specifies for paid and affiliate links, and using it correctly is how a monetised link stays honest with a search engine rather than trying to pass value it has not earned. The map is on this page and nowhere else — it is deliberately kept out of the sitewide footer, so no reader meets it in the middle of a safety page. ## Porta potty rental, by state Pick a state to open that state’s porta potty rental site. These are portable sanitation companies for events, job sites and construction — they are not garage door contractors, and clicking one takes you away from GarageDude. ### Porta potty rental by state A list of all 50 states, laid out in the approximate shape of the United States. Each link opens that state’s porta potty rental site, away from GarageDude. - [AL](https://al.garagedude.shop/) - [AK](https://ak.garagedude.shop/) - [AZ](https://az.garagedude.shop/) - [AR](https://ar.garagedude.shop/) - [CA](https://ca.garagedude.shop/) - [CO](https://co.garagedude.shop/) - [CT](https://ct.garagedude.shop/) - [DE](https://de.garagedude.shop/) - [FL](https://fl.garagedude.shop/) - [GA](https://ga.garagedude.shop/) - [HI](https://hi.garagedude.shop/) - [ID](https://id.garagedude.shop/) - [IL](https://il.garagedude.shop/) - [IN](https://in.garagedude.shop/) - [IA](https://ia.garagedude.shop/) - [KS](https://ks.garagedude.shop/) - [KY](https://ky.garagedude.shop/) - [LA](https://la.garagedude.shop/) - [ME](https://me.garagedude.shop/) - [MD](https://md.garagedude.shop/) - [MA](https://ma.garagedude.shop/) - [MI](https://mi.garagedude.shop/) - [MN](https://mn.garagedude.shop/) - [MS](https://ms.garagedude.shop/) - [MO](https://mo.garagedude.shop/) - [MT](https://mt.garagedude.shop/) - [NE](https://ne.garagedude.shop/) - [NV](https://nv.garagedude.shop/) - [NH](https://nh.garagedude.shop/) - [NJ](https://nj.garagedude.shop/) - [NM](https://nm.garagedude.shop/) - [NY](https://ny.garagedude.shop/) - [NC](https://nc.garagedude.shop/) - [ND](https://nd.garagedude.shop/) - [OH](https://oh.garagedude.shop/) - [OK](https://ok.garagedude.shop/) - [OR](https://or.garagedude.shop/) - [PA](https://pa.garagedude.shop/) - [RI](https://ri.garagedude.shop/) - [SC](https://sc.garagedude.shop/) - [SD](https://sd.garagedude.shop/) - [TN](https://tn.garagedude.shop/) - [TX](https://tx.garagedude.shop/) - [UT](https://ut.garagedude.shop/) - [VT](https://vt.garagedude.shop/) - [VA](https://va.garagedude.shop/) - [WA](https://wa.garagedude.shop/) - [WV](https://wv.garagedude.shop/) - [WI](https://wi.garagedude.shop/) - [WY](https://wy.garagedude.shop/) If what you actually need is garage door help, go back to the [symptom diagnoser](https://garagedude.shop/problems/), the [safety hub](https://garagedude.shop/safety/), or check whether [your state licenses garage door contractors](https://garagedude.shop/licensing/). ## Questions about any of this If something on this page is unclear, or you think a disclosure here is not doing its job, write to [editors@garagedude.shop](mailto:editors@garagedude.shop). We would rather fix the wording than have it sit here being almost right. Our full policy on advertising and affiliate relationships is on the [affiliate disclosure](https://garagedude.shop/affiliate-disclosure/) page, and the editorial rules the funding cannot override are set out in the [editorial policy](https://garagedude.shop/editorial-policy/). ## How does a garage door actually hold its own weight? A garage door is not lifted by the opener — it is lifted by the spring, and the opener only guides it. A residential door weighs 85 to 400 pounds, and the counterbalance holds that weight so the motor only has to overcome friction. That is why springs and cables are professional work while sensors and remotes are not: one group holds the stored energy and the other does not. [Garage door safety](https://garagedude.shop/safety/) covers the balance test and what an unbalanced door does to an opener. ## What is the one-minute test everyone should be doing? The reversal test, monthly, with a 2x4 laid flat in the door's path: it must reverse on contact. If it does not, stop using the opener until it is adjusted, repaired or replaced. It matters because this system fails silently — a door whose reversal has stopped working looks and sounds exactly like one that still does. CPSC recommends inspecting the door and opener every 30 days. [Children, pets and the garage door](https://garagedude.shop/safety/child-safety/) covers why the standard exists. ## What should this cost, and why do we not publish a figure? We do not publish a national average because we could not find a source that holds up. The estimate sites disagree with each other, none documents its method, and repeating a figure we cannot trace would be exactly the problem this site exists to avoid. What we can give you is the shape of a comparable quote. It should separate four lines: the part and its specification, the labour, what is being replaced at the same time, and the warranty — separately — on the part and on the work. Get two written quotes before accepting either, and compare them line by line rather than on the total. Two matching totals can hide a spring with a third of the rated life of the other. Emergency and after-hours rates exist, but we found no sourceable figure for those either, so we do not invent one. [Our position on costs](https://garagedude.shop/costs/) explains the full reasoning. ## At what point should I stop and call someone? - The door is very heavy by hand with the opener disconnected. The counterbalance has failed. - You can see a gap in the spring coil , or a cable that is frayed, slack, or off its drum. - The door sits crooked , higher on one side, or has come off its track. It is still under full tension. - The door does not reverse on the board test. The entrapment protection is not working. None of those is calling too early, and the rule worth teaching at home comes from that same federal text: “NEVER GO UNDER A STOPPED PARTIALLY OPEN DOOR.” ## Questions that come up next ### Does a door that reverses mean something is broken? No — the opposite. A door that stops and goes back up when it touches something is the entrapment protection doing exactly what 16 CFR 1211 requires. The fault worth investigating is a door that fails to reverse. ### Can I disable the photo eyes to get the door closed? No. That removes the external entrapment protection required since 1993, and it is the protection that exists because of the CPSC child fatality record. If a sensor is genuinely faulty, replace it — it is among the cheapest parts on the door. ### Is it safe to use the emergency release with the door open? The federally required manual text says to use it only when the door is closed wherever possible, because weak or broken springs may allow the door to fall rapidly. A great deal of DIY content advises the opposite. ### Should I replace one spring or both? If the door has two, quote both. The second is the same age and has taken the same number of cycles, so it is next. This is one of the few upsells in the trade that is genuinely honest.