How to Tell If Your Garage Door Spring Is Broken

A broken torsion spring is the most common garage door failure we get called out for, and it is also the one homeowners most often misdiagnose as a dead opener. The opener gets blamed, sometimes replaced, and the door still will not move. Here is how to tell the difference from your driveway in about thirty seconds.

The gap in the coil

Look at the bar running horizontally above the door opening. Wrapped around it is one spring, or two on a wider door. A healthy spring is a continuous tight coil from end to end.

If it is broken, you will see a gap. Usually one to two inches of daylight where the metal separated. It is unmistakable once you know to look, because a torsion spring does not stretch or sag when it fails. It snaps, and the two halves recoil apart.

That gap is the whole diagnosis. If it is there, nothing else matters and you do not need to test anything further.

The other four signs

• The door is suddenly extremely heavy. Springs counterbalance the door's weight so the opener only has to guide it. Without them you are lifting the full weight, which on a double door is 150 to 250 pounds.
• You heard a bang. A spring letting go sounds like a gunshot in the garage, often at night when the metal contracts. Many people report hearing it hours before they discover the door will not open.
• The door opens a few inches and stops. Modern openers sense the resistance and shut down to protect the motor. That is the opener working correctly, not failing.
• The top section looks bent. If someone has already tried forcing it with the opener, the motor pulls against a door the spring is no longer holding, and the top panel takes the strain.

What to do right now

Leave the door where it is. If it is closed, keep it closed. Do not run the opener again, because every attempt risks bending panels or pulling the cables off their drums, which turns one repair into three.

If the door is stuck open and you need to secure the house, that is a genuine reason to call at any hour rather than wrestle with it yourself.

Why not to do it yourself

A torsion spring on a standard double door stores enough energy to break bones. It is wound under extreme tension, and it releases all of that at once if a winding bar slips out of the cone. This is the repair that sends people to the emergency room, and it is the one we most often get called to finish after an attempt goes wrong.

The other reason is sizing. A spring has to match the door's actual weight, not the weight a chart says a door that size should be. Wood doors gain weight as they absorb moisture. An insulated replacement door is heavier than the single-layer door it replaced. We weigh the door and size the spring to it, which is the difference between a door that glides and one that fights the opener until the next failure.

Replace both, and consider high-cycle

If your door has two springs and one broke, the other is the same age with the same cycle count and is typically months from going itself. Replacing both is standard and saves a second service call.

A standard spring is rated around 10,000 cycles, one cycle being a full open and close. A family using the garage as their main door burns through that in seven to ten years. High-cycle springs rated at 20,000 or more cost modestly more up front and often outlast two standard sets, which is worth asking about while the door is already apart.