Every so often we take four calls in a week from the same subdivision. Different houses, different families, same complaint: a bang from the garage, and now the door will not lift. It looks like a coincidence. It is not.
Springs are rated in cycles, not years
A torsion spring is a consumable part. It has a service life measured in cycles, where one cycle is the door going up once and coming down once. The standard spring that comes on a builder-installed door is rated for about ten thousand cycles.
Do the arithmetic on a normal household. Two adults leaving and returning on a weekday is four cycles. Add a weekend trip, a delivery, a teenager, and the average lands somewhere between four and six cycles a day. At five a day, ten thousand cycles is a little under five and a half years. At four a day it is closer to seven.
That is the whole story. A spring is not failing early when it goes at year seven. It is doing exactly what it was specified to do.
Why the failures cluster
North Texas suburbs were not built house by house over decades. They were built in phases, hundreds of homes at a time, by the same builder, using the same door supplier, with the same spring specification, installed within months of each other.
So a street in west Plano that went up in 1994 got roughly identical hardware on roughly the same day. The families that moved in have broadly similar routines. Seven years later, the springs on that street start reaching end of life in a cluster, and the second wave comes when the first replacements age out.
This is why our schedule looks the way it does. Plano produces more broken spring calls per week than any other city we cover, and it is purely a function of when it was built and how much of it was built at once. Frisco is going through the same thing now with its early 2000s boom housing. Those homes are on their second set of springs, and the first replacements are reaching end of life together just as the originals did.
What a broken spring looks like
You will usually hear it before you see it. The sound is loud, sharp and metallic, and people consistently describe it as a gunshot from the garage. It often happens when nobody is in the room, because the spring is under its highest load when the door is closed.
Then one of these happens:
- The door will not lift at all, or lifts a few inches and stops
- The opener strains, hums, or reverses immediately
- The door feels enormously heavy if you try to lift it by hand
- You can see a gap in the coil above the door, where the spring has separated
That last one is the clearest confirmation. Look at the spring on the shaft above the door. An intact spring is a continuous coil. A broken one has a visible break with a gap of an inch or two.
Do not run the opener
This is the single most expensive mistake people make. The opener is not designed to lift the weight of the door. It is designed to guide a door that the springs have already balanced. A two car sectional door weighs somewhere between 130 and 350 pounds depending on construction and insulation, and the springs are carrying essentially all of it.
Run the opener against a broken spring and one of three things happens. You strip the drive gear, you burn out the motor, or you pull the door out of its track and add a cable and track repair to the bill. We have replaced plenty of openers that were fine an hour before somebody kept pressing the button.
Why we replace both springs
Most doors run a pair of torsion springs. When one breaks, homeowners reasonably ask why we are quoting two.
The answer is that the second spring is the same age, has the same number of cycles on it, and was made in the same batch. It is not a question of whether it will break, it is a question of which month. Replacing it now costs a fraction of what a second service call costs later, and in the meantime a mismatched pair leaves the door out of balance, which puts uneven load on the opener, the cables and the track.
If someone quotes you a single spring on a two spring door without explaining this, ask why.
What it costs
Spring replacement in the Dallas Fort Worth market typically runs $200 to $450 for a standard pair on a two car door, installed. Oversized doors, high cycle springs and custom weight doors run higher, which is common on the larger three bay garages you find in Flower Mound and the estate properties out in Southlake and Westlake.
High cycle springs are worth mentioning. They cost more up front and are rated for twenty five thousand or fifty thousand cycles instead of ten thousand. On a door that gets heavy use, or on a house you intend to stay in, the arithmetic usually favours them.
Can you tell before it breaks?
Sometimes. A spring approaching end of life often gives warnings that are easy to dismiss:
- The door has become slower or noisier over the past year
- It shudders or hesitates at the same point in its travel every time
- Disconnected from the opener, it no longer holds position at waist height
- There is visible rust, gapping, or stretching in the coil
That last test is the useful one. Pull the release cord to disconnect the opener, lift the door manually to about waist height, and let go. A correctly balanced door stays where you left it. A door that drifts down or shoots up is telling you the springs are no longer matched to the weight.
This is exactly what we check on a tune up, along with the cables, rollers, track alignment and the safety reverse. It is the cheapest service on the list and it heads off most of what becomes an emergency later.
Please do not do this one yourself
We say this about very little. Most garage door maintenance is fine for a competent homeowner, and we will happily talk you through a photo eye alignment on the phone.
Torsion springs are the exception. A wound spring holds a serious amount of stored energy, and releasing it without proper winding bars, correctly sized and correctly seated, is how people lose fingers and break bones. The bottom brackets and the cables stay under tension even when the door is fully open, which is why we tell customers never to unbolt one.
The videos make it look manageable. The emergency room statistics say otherwise.
If it has already gone
Leave the door where it is, do not run the opener, and call us. If the door is stuck partway up and you can hear tension in the assembly, keep people and cars out from underneath it.
We cover Coppell and thirty one other cities across the metroplex, and someone answers from 7am to 11pm, and outside those hours for emergencies, because a garage door that will not close leaves the house open. Call (469) 281-7750 and describe what happened. Nine times out of ten the description alone tells us which spring size to bring.