Heard a bang like a shotgun from the garage, and now the door will not move? That is a snapped torsion spring, and it is the most common garage door failure in West Michigan. It is also the one you should not attempt yourself.
A torsion spring is rated in cycles, not years. One cycle is the door going up and then down again, and a standard spring is built for somewhere around ten thousand of them. A family that leaves twice a day and comes back twice a day burns through roughly fifteen hundred cycles a year, so the spring has a working life of six or seven years before it is living on borrowed time.
What cold does is pick the moment. Steel contracts as the temperature drops, the metal gets less forgiving, and a spring that was going to fail this year fails on the first genuinely cold morning instead of on some mild afternoon in April. That is why garage door companies in Grand Rapids are busiest in the first hard freeze of the season and again after a January cold snap. The cold did not wear the spring out. It just chose the day.
People assume the opener lifts the door. It does not. The springs carry almost the entire weight, and the opener only guides a door that is already balanced against them. A double door weighs somewhere between one hundred and fifty and two hundred and fifty pounds, and with a broken spring every pound of that is hanging on the opener, the cables and whatever is holding the door up.
If you keep hitting the button you will usually burn out the opener gear, and sometimes you will pull the cables off their drums as well. What started as one spring becomes a spring, an opener and a cable job. Leave it down, park outside, and call.
If your door has two springs and one has gone, the other has done exactly the same number of cycles and is exactly as tired. Replacing one is a service call now and a second service call within the year, and you pay the trip charge twice. Any company that offers to swap only the broken one is either saving you nothing or is hoping to see you again soon.
Ask what cycle rating you are getting, too. A higher cycle spring costs a little more up front and lasts substantially longer, which on a door your family uses four times a day is usually the better buy.
The door gets secured, the old spring is unwound under control, the shaft and bearings are checked, the new spring goes on and gets wound to the correct tension for the weight of your specific door, and then the door is balanced and cycled. Balance is the part that matters and the part that gets skipped: a properly balanced door will stay put when you lift it halfway by hand. If it slams down or shoots up, the tension is wrong and the opener is going to pay for it.
We check the cables and the bottom brackets while the door is apart, because on a salted West Michigan driveway that is where the corrosion shows up first, and it is far cheaper to catch it while the technician is already there.
No. The spring carries the door's full weight, which on a double door is roughly one hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty pounds. With it broken, that weight transfers to the opener and the cables, and something will give. Park outside and leave the door down until it is fixed.
Both. They were installed on the same day and have run the same number of cycles, so the second one is just as worn. Replacing one means a second call and a second trip charge, usually within the year.
It is the one garage door repair we would genuinely tell you not to attempt. A wound torsion spring stores a very large amount of energy, and the winding bars are what release it in a controlled way. People are seriously injured doing this every year. Extension springs are only marginally less dangerous.
Typically under an hour for a standard residential door once the technician is on site, including balancing and cycling the door. A door that also needs cables or a bottom bracket takes longer.
Related: Cable Repair · Off-Track Repair · Tune-Up
Same-day spring replacement across Grand Rapids and West Michigan.
