Your torsion spring has broken. Here is what not to do

A broken torsion spring is the single most common serious garage door failure, and it is the one where what people do in the first ten minutes makes the biggest difference to the bill. Most of the damage we repair after a spring failure was not caused by the spring. It was caused by what happened next.

How to know that is what it is

Usually there is a bang, loud enough to be heard inside the house. After that the door either will not open at all or feels enormously heavy. If you look at the bar above the opening you will often see a clear gap in what was a continuous coil, sometimes a couple of inches wide.

Some doors use extension springs along the horizontal tracks instead, which is more common on older and lighter installations. The symptom is the same: the door has lost its counterbalance and become its own dead weight.

What the spring was actually doing

A garage door is heavy. A double width insulated door can be well over two hundred pounds. The spring is what makes that liftable, storing energy when the door comes down and giving it back when the door goes up. When the spring is right, the door is close to weightless through its whole travel.

The opener is not there to lift the door. It is there to guide a balanced door up and down. This is the single most useful thing to understand about the machine on your garage, because it explains every mistake below.

Do not keep pressing the button

This is the big one. When the counterbalance has gone, the opener is being asked to lift the entire weight of the door on its own. It was never sized for that.

What follows is predictable. The trolley or the drive gear takes the load and fails. The chain or belt can jump. On some doors the top section bends where the opener arm attaches, because the arm is pulling against a door the rest of the mechanism is not lifting. You started with a broken spring and now you have a broken spring, a broken opener and a damaged section.

Do not try to lift it by hand

Without the counterbalance, you are lifting the full weight of the door directly. People do manage it, and people also drop it. A door coming down under its own weight is a serious crush hazard, and there is nothing in the mechanism at that point designed to catch it.

If a vehicle is trapped inside and it genuinely cannot wait, that is a conversation to have with us on the phone rather than a thing to attempt alone.

Do not replace one spring on a two spring door

Where a door has two springs, they were fitted together, have done the same number of cycles and have aged identically. When one goes, the other is at the same point in its life and typically follows within months.

Replacing both is not an upsell. It is the difference between one visit and two, and it keeps the balance even across the bar, which matters for how the door tracks.

Do not buy a spring off the internet

Torsion springs are specified by wire diameter, inside diameter, length and wind direction, and getting any of those wrong produces a door that is either unliftable or dangerously over sprung. Winding one onto the bar requires proper winding bars and a technique that exists precisely because the alternative injures people.

This is the job that sends people to hospital. Screwdrivers and lengths of rebar are not winding bars, and the energy involved does not forgive improvisation.

What to do instead

• Stop using the opener completely. Unplug it if other people in the house might try.
• Pull the manual release cord so the door is disconnected from the opener.
• Leave the door in whatever position it is in, and keep people and vehicles from under it.
• If the door is stuck open and the building is exposed, say so when you call.
• Note the door size and roughly how old it is, which helps us bring the right spring.

It is usually a same visit repair

Handled promptly, a broken spring is routine. We typically provide same day or next day service depending on the schedule and the complexity, and a spring replacement with the door already in front of us is not a long job.

Emergency cover runs 24 hours across Washtenaw, Wayne and Oakland Counties, because a door stuck open is an open building and that does not wait for Monday.