A broken spring is the number one reason a door will not open. We replace torsion and extension springs same-day, safely.
This surprises most people. A double garage door weighs somewhere between 150 and 400 pounds, and the half-horsepower motor bolted to your ceiling could not lift that on its best day. The springs counterbalance nearly the entire weight of the door; the opener only overcomes the small remaining imbalance and guides the travel.
Which is why a broken spring is not a partial failure. The door goes from something an opener can move to a dead weight it cannot, and continuing to press the button just burns out the motor you will then also be paying to replace.
Springs are rated in cycles, not years. One cycle is one open plus one close. A standard spring is rated around 10,000 cycles, so the arithmetic is straightforward: a household using the garage as its main entrance four times a day burns roughly 1,460 cycles a year and reaches end of life in about seven years. Use it eight times a day and you are there in three and a half.
Cold matters too. Steel loses ductility as temperature drops, which is why so many springs let go on the first hard freeze in Chester County — the spring was already at end of life and the cold was the last straw. If yours broke in January, it was not the weather alone.
High-cycle springs are rated 20,000 to 30,000 cycles. They cost modestly more and roughly double or triple the service life, which on a heavily used door is the cheaper option over time. We will quote both.
On a two-spring door we strongly recommend replacing both, and we will explain why rather than just charging you for two. Both springs were fitted on the same day and have taken the same number of cycles. When one fails, the other is at the same point in its life and typically follows within months.
Replace only the broken one and you pay the service call twice, and in between you are running a new spring against a fatigued one — an unbalanced door that wears the opener, the cables and the rollers unevenly. Doing both once is cheaper than doing one twice.
We also size the replacement to your door's actual weight and drum size rather than matching whatever was on it. Under-sprung doors are genuinely common, particularly where a heavier insulated door was fitted later without anyone recalculating the spring.
We are usually happy to tell people when they can handle something themselves. Not this. A wound torsion spring stores an enormous amount of energy, and releasing it without the correct winding bars — not screwdrivers, which is the classic substitution — is how people lose fingers and take bars to the face. Extension springs along the tracks carry the same risk and can fire the length of the garage if a safety cable is not fitted.
If you take one thing from this page: do not put anything into those winding cones that was not made for it.
Torsion springs mount on a bar above the door opening and are the modern standard — better balanced, longer-lived and safer in failure. Extension springs run along the horizontal tracks either side and are common on older Chester County installations. If yours are extension springs without safety containment cables running through them, we will fit those regardless, because an extension spring breaking without a cable becomes a projectile.
We carry the common sizes on the truck, so most spring calls are finished in a single visit.
Typically under an hour once we are on site. We stock the common sizes, so the majority of spring calls are completed on the first visit.
On a two-spring door, yes, we would strongly recommend it. Both took the same cycles, so the second normally fails within months — meaning you pay the service call twice and run an unbalanced door in between.
Standard springs are rated around 10,000 cycles, which is roughly seven years of average use and considerably less if the garage is your main entrance. High-cycle springs run 20,000 to 30,000 and are worth it on a busy door.
Do not try. The door is now its full dead weight with nothing counterbalancing it, and it can drop. Leave it where it is, disconnect the opener if the door is down, and call.
Steel loses ductility as temperature falls, so a spring already near the end of its cycle life tends to let go on the first hard freeze. The cold is the trigger, not the cause — it was due anyway.
We would strongly advise against it. Wound torsion springs store enough energy to cause serious injury, and they need proper winding bars rather than improvised tools. This is the one repair we tell everyone to leave alone.
Call now for a free quote and same-day garage door service across Chester County.
Call (610) 632-5206