Window repair in Phoenix

Most windows that stop working do not need replacing. A sash that drags, a crank that spins, a latch that will not catch and a pane with a crack across it are all repairs, and we have been making them in Phoenix homes since 2010.

Reach a glazier on (602) 777-3717, Monday to Friday, 7:30am to 5:00pm. Nothing is charged for the visit that produces your quote.

Which way does your window move?

Answer that one question and you have sorted the call. Movement decides which parts exist behind the frame, and half the wasted service visits in this trade come from guessing wrong about it.

• Side to side. A horizontal slider, the workhorse window of the Valley. The sash rides on small wheels in a bottom track. There are no balances anywhere in it, so stiffness is wheels, grit or a worn rail, never a spring.
• Up and down. A single hung or double hung. Something has to hold the weight of that sash at whatever height you left it, and that something is a balance. When the sash slams down, the balance is the suspect.
• It swings out on a crank. A casement, or an awning if it hinges at the top. Now you have a geared operator, an arm and a pair of hinge tracks, and any of the three can be the fault.
• It does not move at all. A picture window or a fixed lite. There is no mechanism to break, so whatever is wrong is the glass, the glazing bead or the seal around it.

One local note worth having before you call. Because sliders dominate housing stock here, we take far more roller calls than balance calls, which is the reverse of what the national repair advice online would lead you to expect.

The sash will not stay up

On a hung window, a spring device inside the jamb carries the sash weight. When it fails, the window either drops on your fingers or refuses to lift at all. One side failing on its own makes the sash sit crooked and bind in the channel.

Type matters, because block and tackle, spiral and constant force units are not interchangeable, and each comes in lengths and tensions matched to the weight of that particular sash. We look before we order for exactly that reason. The full detail on identifying yours, and on why spiral balances and custom sizes run a 3 to 4 week lead time while common standard sizes come off the truck, sits on the window balance replacement page.

The slider fights you every time you open it

A sliding window in good order moves with one finger. When it needs a shoulder, the wheels underneath have flattened, seized or lost a bearing, or the track they run in is packed with the fine grit that blows around this city all year.

Order of failure matters to your bill. Grit gets ground between wheel and rail, the wheel wears first, then the rail wears into a groove, and after that a new set of wheels alone will not fix it. That is the point where we cap the rail with steel rather than send you shopping for a whole new unit. How we tell dirt from wear, and what a track cap involves, is covered on sliding door rollers and track repair. Patio doors have their own page at sliding glass door repair.

The crank turns and nothing opens

Here is the whole diagnosis, because a casement is simple once you know what sits behind the handle. The crank drives a worm gear in a small gearbox, the gearbox drives an arm, and the arm pushes the sash along a hinge track screwed to the frame. Three parts, three distinct failures, and you can tell them apart from the kitchen without any tools.

How to tell a stripped gearbox from a seized hinge

• The handle spins freely and the sash does not move. The gears inside the operator have stripped. Turning it more will not help and there is nothing to adjust. The operator is replaced as a unit.
• It is stiff, and it has been getting stiffer for months. That is the hinge track binding, usually from dust baked into old grease, sometimes from corrosion where the track meets the sill. The operator is probably fine. Forcing a stiff window is how people end up needing both parts, because the arm bends before the hinge lets go.
• The sash opens but will not pull back flush, or it catches on one corner. A bent arm, or a hinge shoe that has come out of its channel. The sash usually has to come off to put it right.
• The handle turns but slips at one point in the rotation. The splines where the handle grips the shaft have rounded off. That is the smallest of the four repairs and often the fastest.

What we do about it

Operators are made to fit a specific manufacturer and a specific hand, left or right, so a technician reads the stamp on the housing and matches it. Hinge tracks come off, get cleaned back to bare metal and go on again with a dry lubricant rather than a wet grease, because anything sticky in Phoenix collects dust and puts you back where you started inside a year.

The honest limit is parts. Casements are a minority window here and some of the older operators have been out of production for a long time. When nothing matches, the choices are a universal operator that fits the hole pattern if one exists, or converting that opening at the point where you are ready for window installation. We will tell you which of those you are facing at the measure.

There is fog between the panes

Haze or beads of water sitting between two panes of glass means the sealed unit has failed. That is not a cleaning problem and it is not a repair. Air carrying moisture has worked its way into the cavity, and every night when the temperature drops it condenses inside where nothing can reach it. Services that drill a hole and vent the unit clear the view for a season without restoring anything.

What we do is take out the sealed unit and set a new one in the same frame. Please refer to foggy window repair and dual pane glass replacement for why the heat here shortens the life of these seals and how long a replacement takes.

Weatherstripping and perimeter seals

These are a separate family of parts from the glass seal and they can be renewed. Sliders use a fiber pile in the jamb and meeting rail, hung windows use pile and a bulb gasket, and the glass itself is held by a vinyl glazing bead around its edge.

They die of sunlight and heat here rather than of use. Pile goes brittle and lies flat, bulb gaskets harden until they no longer compress, and glazing bead shrinks back from the corners. The complaint we hear is not usually a cold draft. It is dust: a fine line of it along the sill after a windy afternoon, a gritty film on the inside of the glass, and in the worst cases a whistle when the wind comes from that quarter. Hold a flashlight at the closed meeting rail after dark and have someone look from outside. Light through the seam is your answer.

We replace pile and bulb seals where the profile is still made, and we re-bed glazing bead when it has pulled away. Where a discontinued profile has no equivalent, we say so instead of packing the gap with something that will fail again by August.

Cracked and broken panes

Flat glass with a crack in it gets replaced. There is no resin fill for a house window the way there is for a chipped windshield, and a crack in a pane will keep traveling with every hot afternoon until it lets go on its own. If a bird put the crack there, caring for a bird that strikes a window covers the part most people ask about first.

Speed comes down to what the glass is. Our glaziers carry single strength and double strength annealed glass along with clear and bronze laminated, so plenty of single pane work is measured, cut and fitted at your house in one stop. Tempered glass cannot be cut after heat treatment, so a tempered lite is fabricated to size first. Sealed insulated units are built by local Phoenix fabricators and come back to us in five to seven days. Details on both sit under single pane glass and window glass replacement.

What we do not do

We are a glass company, and the edges of that are worth stating plainly.

• No frame fabrication. We do not build window frames from stock.
• No stucco or drywall repair around an opening, and no painting afterwards.
• No solar screens or security screens. Insect screen repair and rescreening only.
• If a frame is corroded through or the sill under it has rotted, we tell you at the measure. New glass in a frame like that will not seal and will not stay square, and taking the job anyway would be doing you a disservice.

How the quote and the payment work

A technician comes out, measures, and hands you a written quote. Nothing is owed to us before that document exists. Hardware repairs are frequently done on that same visit if the part is aboard the truck.

When glass has to be ordered, approval is followed by a 50% deposit and the unit goes into fabrication. Glass cut to your opening has no second buyer, which is the whole reason that deposit exists. Hardware and stock sliding door glass are billed on completion instead. Our workmanship is covered by a lifetime limited warranty for as long as the property is yours.

Where we work

Our glaziers work a 50 mile radius drawn around 4202 E Elwood St #21, Phoenix, AZ 85040. Ahwatukee, Tempe and Chandler are short runs for us, Gilbert and Queen Creek take longer, and the far west valley towns are still inside the line. Every repair is carried out at the property. For anything outside window hardware, start from residential window and glass repair.

Common questions

My window slides sideways and it is stiff. Is that the balance?

No. Horizontal sliders have no balances in them at all. Stiffness in a side-to-side window is worn wheels or grit in the track, and both are usually a one-visit fix.

Why does my window slam shut when I let go of it?

The balance carrying that sash has lost its tension or snapped. Stop using the window until it is repaired, because a heavy sash coming down on a hand does real damage.

Who repairs window cranks and casement operators in Phoenix?

We do. Tell us on the phone whether the handle spins freely or whether it is stiff, because those two symptoms point at different parts and it changes what the glazier brings.

Where can I find out what my window parts are called?

Our window terminology page names the sash, the jamb, the meeting rail, the glazing bead and the rest, which makes describing the fault on the phone much easier.

Does repairing a window cost less than replacing it?

In nearly every case where the frame is sound, yes. A repair leaves the wall closed, so there is no exterior finish work and no interior patching, and those trades are often the largest line on a replacement quote.

Can you fix a window that is painted shut?

Sometimes. If the paint bridge is the only problem we can cut it free and get the sash moving. If someone painted over the balance channel or the hinge track and the mechanism underneath has seized, that becomes a hardware repair as well.

Do you repair windows in rental properties for landlords?

Yes, and we quote the same way. We do need someone with authority to approve the work and someone to give the technician access to the unit at the appointment.

How long does a window repair take?

A hardware repair with a stocked part is usually under an hour at the window. A glass repair depends on the glass, from same visit for stock annealed up to the fabrication lead time for insulated or tempered units.

Book a repair

Call (602) 777-3717, Monday to Friday, 7:30am to 5:00pm. Say which way the window moves and what it is doing, and we can usually name the part before the truck rolls. If the pane itself is the problem rather than the mechanism, go to window glass replacement, and for everything else in the house see residential window and glass repair.

Which cities do we cover?

We work across the Valley, inside 50 miles of the shop on Elwood Street. Start with your city for what we see most in the housing stock there.