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There is a pattern to spring calls. They cluster in the coldest weeks of the year, and they arrive in bunches. If you have ever wondered why your door chose the January cold snap to fail, there is a real reason for it.
What the springs actually do
A garage door is heavy. Far heavier than the opener could lift on its own. The springs carry almost all of that weight, and the opener really only guides the door up and down.
That is why a door with healthy springs can be lifted by hand with very little effort once the opener is disconnected, and why a door with a broken spring feels like it has been bolted to the floor.
Springs are rated in cycles rather than years. One cycle is one open and one close. A typical residential spring is rated somewhere in the region of ten thousand cycles, which sounds like a lot until you count a household going in and out four times a day.
Why winter finishes them off
Three things stack up in the cold.
Steel behaves differently at minus thirty. A spring that has been quietly losing capacity for years is least forgiving when it is coldest, and that is when the existing fatigue finally shows.
The door itself gets heavier. Ice builds up along the bottom seal and around the frame, and the door is now carrying weight it was not sized for. Sometimes it is frozen to the slab outright, so the first thing that happens on a cold morning is that the opener tries to lift a door that is stuck fast.
And usage goes up. Doors get opened more often in winter, not less.
None of that creates the problem. It just brings forward a failure that was already coming.
Telling a broken spring from a dead opener
People often assume the opener has died, because the symptom looks the same from inside the house.
Look at the shaft above the door. A broken torsion spring shows an obvious gap where the coil has separated, usually a couple of inches. On a door with extension springs, look along the tracks instead.
The other clue is sound. A spring going almost always makes a loud bang, often loud enough to be heard through the house. If you heard a bang and the door has not worked since, it is very unlikely to be the opener.
And if the motor hums but nothing moves, that is a door too heavy to lift rather than a motor that has stopped working.
What not to do
Do not keep pressing the button. The opener is now trying to lift the full weight of the door on its own, and you will take out the drive gear or the logic board on top of the spring you already need replacing.
Do not try to force the door up by hand. A door with one broken spring is unbalanced, and it can come down hard or twist itself off the track.
Do not attempt to replace the spring yourself. Torsion springs hold a very large amount of stored energy, and releasing it without proper winding bars is the repair on a garage door that goes wrong fastest and most seriously. We are not saying that to sell a call-out. It is simply true.
If one has gone, replace the pair
On a door fitted with two springs, we recommend replacing both. They went on at the same time and have been through the same number of cycles, so the second one is usually not far behind. Doing both on one visit costs less than two separate call-outs a few months apart.
It also matters that the replacement is sized to your specific door rather than being whatever fits the shaft. A spring that is close but not correct leaves the door out of balance, and an unbalanced door quietly wears out its next set of springs and its opener along with them.
Getting it fixed
We replace springs across Regina, Estevan and Arcola, usually the same day or the next, and we rebalance the door and reset the opener limits afterwards rather than just fitting the part.
If your door has stopped and you heard a bang, leave it alone and call your nearest branch.