Signs of a broken garage door spring

Springs do the actual lifting on a garage door. The opener only guides a balanced door along its track. When a spring breaks, several hundred pounds of door becomes dead weight, and everything downstream — opener, cables, track — is suddenly at risk.

The seven signs

1. A loud bang from the garage. People describe it as a gunshot or a car hitting the house. That is the coil releasing.
2. A visible gap in the spring. Look at the shaft above the door. A torsion spring that has broken shows a clean two-inch separation in the coil.
3. The door lifts a few inches and stops. The opener's force sensor detects the weight and gives up. That is the opener protecting itself.
4. The door is impossibly heavy by hand. A balanced double door feels like lifting ten pounds. With a broken spring it feels like lifting a car hood full of bricks.
5. The door is crooked. Common on doors with extension springs along each side: one side gives up, the other keeps pulling.
6. Loose or hanging cables. When tension drops, cables unwind off the drums and drape down the sides.
7. The opener strains, hums or trips. Running it in this state is how a repair turns into a repair plus a new opener.

What not to do

Do not keep pressing the button. Do not park under a partly open door. Do not try to wind a torsion spring yourself: it takes proper winding bars and the correct wire size, length, inside diameter and wind direction, and getting it wrong causes serious injuries every year.

Why both springs get replaced

On a two-spring door, both have cycled the same number of times. When the first fails, the second is typically within months of doing the same. Replacing the pair costs a little more once and saves a second callout, and it keeps the door balanced so the opener is not fighting an uneven load.

How long a replacement takes

About an hour on site for a standard residential door, including re-balancing and re-setting the opener's force limits. We stock the common wire sizes on the truck, which is why same day spring replacement is realistic across Connecticut.

Making springs last longer

Standard springs are rated around 10,000 cycles — roughly seven years at four cycles a day, or two years for a busy family that uses the garage as the front door. High-cycle springs rated at 25,000 or more are worth the upgrade if you are in and out constantly, and they are standard on our commercial work.