Garage Door Spring Repair

The First Ten Minutes After the Bang

Most people learn a spring broke from the sound: one sharp bang from the garage, like a firecracker or a board hitting concrete. That noise is the spring's steel coil snapping and unwinding in a fraction of a second. Here is what to do right away:

• Leave the door where it is. If it is closed, keep it closed. If it stopped partway, do not walk or park under it.
• Stop pressing the opener button. An opener straining against an unbalanced door can burn out its motor or strip the gear that drives the trolley carriage — turning one repair into two.
• Do not pull the red release cord while the door is up. The spring is what actually carries the door's weight. Release the opener with a broken spring and the door can free-fall.
• Unplug the opener so no one in the house opens the door out of habit, then use another exit.

Waiting has real costs. The lifting cables, now slack, can slip off their drums and tangle, and a door frozen partway open is an open invitation to weather and intruders.

How to Confirm the Spring Is Broken

You can diagnose this by looking — never by touching. Torsion springs are the tight steel coils mounted on a horizontal shaft above the door opening. Extension springs are the long, stretchy springs that run beside the horizontal tracks on each side. Check for these signs from the floor:

• A gap in the torsion coil. A healthy torsion spring is one continuous coil. A broken one shows a clean separation, often about two inches wide, where the steel snapped.
• Loose or sagging cables. With no spring tension holding them taut, the lift cables droop, cross, or come off the drums entirely.
• The door feels far too heavy. Springs do almost all the lifting; a double-car door can weigh well over 150 pounds. If the door will barely budge, the counterbalance is gone.
• The opener lifts a few inches, then quits. Most openers have a force limit and stop rather than fight the full weight.

If the coils look intact but a cable is frayed or off its drum, that is a different repair — see our cable repair page. If the rollers have left the track, that is an off-track problem.

Why It Broke: The 10,000-Cycle Clock

Standard garage door springs are rated for roughly 10,000 cycles, and one cycle means one full open and close. A household that runs the door four times a day uses up those cycles in about seven years. A family that treats the garage as the front door — eight or ten cycles a day — can wear out springs in half that time.

Rust shortens the count further, because corrosion pits the steel and creates weak points in the coil. Cold weather does too: steel gets more brittle as temperatures drop, which is why so many springs snap on the first lift of a cold morning. The one safe thing a homeowner can do is spray the coils with a garage-door lubricant a couple of times a year — spray only, from arm's length, never loosening or adjusting any hardware.

Replace Both Springs — and Never Do This Yourself

If your door has two springs and only one snapped, plan on replacing both. The surviving spring has the exact same cycle count as the one that failed, so it is already at the end of its life. Pairing a fresh spring with a worn one also lifts the door unevenly, which twists the door and grinds one side's rollers and track.

Now the honest warning. A torsion spring is wound under enormous tension — it stores enough energy to hoist a door heavier than a refrigerator. Installing or adjusting one requires winding bars and a specific sequence, and a slip during winding can drive a steel bar into a hand or face. The bottom brackets that anchor the cables are under that same tension. This page will not give steps for any of it, because there is no safe DIY version of this job. Springs, cables, and bottom brackets belong to a technician with the right tools.

How to Request a Spring Repair

Submit a service request through the form on our contact page and describe what you found. The more specific you are, the better a technician can prepare:

• Single-car or double-car door, and whether it is steel, wood, or composite.
• Where the springs sit — coiled above the opening (torsion) or stretched beside the tracks (extension).
• What you heard and when the door stopped working.
• A photo of the gap in the coil, taken from the floor, if you can do it without going near the door.

Replacement springs are matched to the door's exact weight using wire size, coil length, and inside diameter — which is why guessing at a hardware store so often ends with a door that slams or will not stay open. A technician can measure the old spring and the door and fit the right pair the first time.