Cyclone Yasi Damaged Roller Doors at Nearly Five Times the Rate of Panel Doors

What a roller door costs next to a typical new garage door

At Going Rate's prices, a typical new garage door ($4,550) costs about one and a half times a roller door, supplied and installed ($3,050). The difference is about $1,500. The garage door calculator covers roller, sectional, tilt and custom doors, so its typical figure is a general new-door price rather than a sectional-only one.

The roller door wins on more than price in some places. B&D's warranty table rates the springs on its Roll-A-Door roller at 30,000 cycles and on its Panelift sectional door at 10,000 cycles, a third as many. The table's years of cover exclude springs, seals and lifting cables, and list springs by cycle count instead.

Outside cyclone regions, the two styles mostly compete on looks, space above the opening and spring life. In the cyclone regions of the north, engineers have measured how each style held up in a real storm.

What Cyclone Yasi did to roller doors

Cyclone Yasi crossed the north Queensland coast in February 2011. Its peak gusts were estimated at 240 km/h, just under the 250 km/h most buildings in the area were designed for, according to a 2012 paper by Boughton and Henderson of the Cyclone Testing Station. The station examined more than 1,900 houses and other low-rise buildings.

In its Technical Report 57, the station found 29% of roller doors damaged in its street surveys, against 6% of sectional doors, and set both against the fewer than 3% of post-1980s houses with significant roof damage. Roller doors were damaged at nearly five times the sectional rate. The report says roller door failures were over-represented in the damage, at about ten times the frequency of serious roof damage in post-80s housing, while sectional doors ran at about twice that frequency.

The roller doors also failed below their design loads. TR57 observed roller door failures across the entire study area, where estimated gust speeds ranged from 70% of the design wind speed to over 90% of it, equal to 50% to 80% of the design wind pressure.

Why the 2011 figures do not describe today's doors

TR57 was published in April 2011 and looked at doors installed before the current garage door standard, AS/NZS 4505:2012. In February 2013, Standards Australia chief executive Colin Blair told Climate Control News that it became clear garage doors were a point of weakness during Cyclone Yasi, and that the technical committee had updated the standard as a result.

The Queensland Government's garage door factsheet says that before the current standards, many garage doors were not reinforced and could not withstand the wind pressures of a severe weather event. Wind-rated roller doors built and tested to the 2012 standard may perform very differently from the doors the engineers counted in 2011. We found no published survey that repeats the Yasi comparison on doors built to the new standard.

A buyer in a cyclone region should check that the door, roller or sectional, is certified to AS/NZS 4505:2012 for the site's wind pressure. A standard roller door installation ($3,050) and a typical new garage door ($4,550) are both general prices. Wind-rated doors and reinforced frames usually cost more.

The Queensland grant for wind-rated garage doors

Queensland's Household Resilience Program closed to new applications on 2 October 2026. The program page sets 31 May 2027 as the last date for grant approvals, unless funding is committed earlier, and 1 August 2027 for finished works, so households already in the system can still use it. The program pays 80% of the cost of eligible upgrades, up to a $15,000 grant, including replacing existing garage doors and frames with doors that meet AS/NZS 4505:2012 wind pressure tests. Applicants had to own and live in a house built before 1984, within 50 km of the coast from north of Bundaberg to Cape York and west to the Northern Territory border, and earn under an income limit, such as $1,249 a week for an individual. The minimum value of works is $3,300 including GST, and the garage door factsheet says the new door must replace an existing one, so additional doors do not qualify.

As an illustration at Going Rate's prices, the grant on a typical new garage door ($4,550) would be about $3,640, leaving the owner about $910. That is less than two repair call-outs ($540). A typical roller door installation ($3,050) sits about $250 below the program's $3,300 minimum, though a real wind-rated job that includes frames may cost more and clear it.

Queensland also ran a Strata Resilience Program for bodies corporate. The Australian Reinsurance Pool Corporation reported in August 2025 that it covered up to 75% of cyclone-resilience upgrades, including garage doors, capped at $15,000 per residential tenancy and $150,000 per property. The Queensland Government says applications closed on 30 June 2026.

Storm claims and what a door costs next to them

The Insurance Council of Australia says extreme weather caused $4.8 billion in insured losses in 2025, up 727% on 2024. Insurers handled 294,000 claims from declared events, and the average claim rose 39% to $16,471. That average is more than three and a half times a typical new garage door ($4,550) at Going Rate's prices.

Ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred, which hit south-east Queensland and northern New South Wales in late February and March 2025, produced more than 133,000 claims worth $1.5 billion. The November 2025 Queensland and NSW storm and hail event was the costliest of the year at $1.78 billion. Losses swing hard between years, from $2.35 billion in 2023 to $585 million in 2024, the ICA says.

No insurer or ICA figure breaks those claims down by garage door damage. The Queensland homeowner information sheet only suggests asking your insurer whether resilience works earn a premium benefit, so owners should check before counting on a lower premium.

Garage door repair or a new door: springs, warranties and servicing

A typical garage door repair ($540) costs roughly an eighth of a new garage door ($4,550), so a door would need about eight repairs before the repair bills matched a replacement at Going Rate's prices.

B&D gives a 10-year warranty when its door and opener are bought and installed together. Its warranty page says doors alone carry five to seven years and motors five to seven years, though its model table lists anywhere from one year (Flex-A-Door) to 10 years (Designer Door). Its spring ratings run from 10,000 cycles on the Panelift to 30,000 on the Roll-A-Door, and the years of cover exclude springs. As our own assumption, a door opened and closed four times a day would reach 10,000 cycles in about seven years and 30,000 in about 20.

B&D also makes servicing a warranty condition. Owners must have the door and opener serviced within the first 12 months, then at least once every two years. An owner who skips a service risks losing warranty cover on a door that later needs a repair ($540).

Security, safety and the rest of the garage

The ABS says 1.8% of households (196,600) had a break-in in 2024-25, and 2.0% (217,500) had an attempted break-in. In 2023-24, a damaged or tampered door or window was the evidence in 40% of attempted break-ins. The ABS does not record which door. Victoria Police, citing the Crime Statistics Agency, reported 5,887 residential aggravated burglaries in the 12 months to December 2023, up almost 30% on the year before, with many offenders hunting for car keys. Police say offenders have been using garage doors as an entry point to houses, and advise locking the internal door from the garage and taking remotes out of parked cars, even in locked garages.

Garage remotes carry button batteries. Kidsafe Australia says about 20 children a week present to an emergency department with a suspected button battery ingestion or insertion. CHOICE reports that by 2020, button batteries had caused three deaths and at least 44 serious injuries in Australia, and a mandatory standard requiring secured battery compartments took effect on 22 June 2022.

Securing the driveway costs more than securing the garage. An automatic gate ($11,000) costs nearly two and a half times a new garage door ($4,550) at Going Rate's prices. An epoxy garage floor ($4,600) costs about the same as a typical new garage door ($4,550), while converting a garage into living space ($41,000) costs about as much as nine new doors.

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