What a screen warranty can honestly cover.
Terms are printed on your work order before you sign it, not sent afterwards. This page explains what the categories mean, because “lifetime warranty” on a screen job is usually a sentence with no structure behind it.
Workmanship
This is the part that is genuinely ours. If mesh pulls out of a groove because the spline was the wrong gauge, undersized, poorly seated or reused; if a panel was left slack or over-tensioned to the point that it distorts the frame; if a fastener was missed, a splice left loose or a member set out of plumb — that is our error and we come back and fix it at no cost.
Workmanship cover is the only category where the contractor controls the outcome completely, which is why it is the one worth reading.
Materials
Mesh, spline, extrusion, fasteners and hardware carry whatever the manufacturer offers, and the terms come from the manufacturer, not from us. We will tell you what those terms actually are for the products going on your job and hand you the documentation. What we will not do is repeat a manufacturer’s marketing number as though it were our own promise.
Structure and anchorage
On new enclosures and structural rebuilds, the structure is built to the engineered drawing set: the specified members, the specified fastener schedule, the specified anchor type and spacing. Our cover is that it was built to that drawing. The drawing itself is the engineer’s work and the design wind speed on it comes from the code map for your address.
What is not covered, and why
Wind damage to screen. This is the one people are most surprised by, and it is the most important thing on this page. Mesh is designed to fail before the frame does. In a strong enough gust a panel blows out, the pressure escapes, and the structure survives. A blown panel after a storm is usually not a defect — it is the enclosure doing exactly what it was designed to do. Any company promising that its screen will not blow out is promising you something worse: a frame that takes the full load instead.
Impact. Branches, furniture, ladders, balls, dogs and mowers. Kick plates exist because of the bottom eighteen inches of that list, and they are the cheapest insurance on a cage.
Existing structure we did not supply. On a rescreen of somebody else’s cage we warrant our work — the mesh, the spline, the fit — not the frame it went onto. Where we think that frame has a problem we write it down before we start.
Fading and weathering. Every mesh loses color and strength under Florida sun. That is service life, not failure. Anybody who tells you otherwise is selling the same product as everybody else.
Work altered afterwards. If somebody else re-tensions panels, changes hardware, adds solid panels or re-anchors posts, we cannot stand behind what happens next.
How to make a claim. Call the desk with the job number from your record sheet. Somebody comes and looks at it. If it is ours, we fix it and it costs nothing. If it is not ours, we tell you what it actually is and what it would cost — which is the more useful answer even when it is the one nobody wants.
A named specification, drawn, so there is nothing to argue about later.
Ask what the terms are before you agree a price.
Any contractor should be able to tell you what is covered, for how long, and what wind damage counts as.