Broken Garage Door Spring Repair

If there was a loud bang from the garage and now the door will not lift, a spring has broken. This is the single most common garage door failure, and it is the one people most often misdiagnose as a dead opener.

Why the opener is not the problem

The springs, not the motor, carry the weight of the door. A double garage door weighs somewhere around 150 to 200 pounds; the springs counterbalance almost all of it so the opener only has to overcome the remainder. When a spring breaks, the opener is suddenly asked to lift the full weight, which it cannot do — and if you keep pressing the button, that is how you turn a spring job into a spring job plus a new opener.

How to tell it is the spring

• A loud bang, sometimes heard from inside the house, with no obvious cause
• A visible gap in the coiled spring on the bar above the door
• The opener strains, the door lifts an inch or two, then stops
• Pulled off the opener, the door is far too heavy to lift by hand
• The top section flexes or bows when the opener tries to lift it

Torsion and extension

Most GTA doors use torsion springs — the ones on the steel bar above the opening. Older and lighter doors sometimes use extension springs, which run along the horizontal tracks either side. Extension springs should always have a containment cable running through them; if yours does not, that is a genuine safety problem and worth correcting whether or not the spring has failed.

Why both springs get replaced

Springs are rated in cycles — a common spring is good for roughly 10,000 open-and-close cycles, which for a family using the garage as the main door is somewhere around five to seven years. Both springs on a door have done the same work. When one goes, the other is at the same point in its life, and replacing only the broken one reliably means a second callout within months. We replace them as a pair, and we can fit higher-cycle springs where the door is used heavily.

This is the one repair not to attempt

A torsion spring holds a very large amount of stored energy, and it is wound and unwound with bars under load. Getting that wrong causes serious injuries, and it is the reason spring work is the one job on a garage door that is genuinely not a homeowner repair. Leave the door down, leave the opener alone, and do not park underneath it.

What we do

Both springs replaced and correctly wound for your door’s weight, cables and drums checked and re-seated, the door balanced by hand, and the opener’s force and travel limits re-set afterwards — because a new spring changes what the opener has to do.