Broken spring

If you heard a bang like a gunshot from the garage and the door will not open afterwards, you almost certainly have this. It is the most common garage door failure there is.

The ten-second check

1. Look at the spring. On most doors it is the long spring on the shaft above the opening. A broken torsion spring shows a visible gap of an inch or two where it parted, and the coils either side look separated. It is obvious once you know to look.
2. Pull the release cord (the red handle on the rail) to disconnect the opener.
3. Try to lift the door by hand a few inches. A working door is nearly weightless and stays where you leave it. A door with a broken spring is extremely heavy and slams back down if you let go.

That third test is the definitive one, and it is also the point at which to stop. If the door is heavy, put it down and call someone.

Why the bang

The spring is wound tight from the day it is installed. Over thousands of cycles the steel fatigues, and when it finally fails the stored energy releases all at once inside the coil. The noise is loud enough that people regularly report it as a break-in or a car hitting the house.

Why this one is not a DIY job

Plenty of garage door work is reasonable to do yourself. This is not.

• A torsion spring is wound under high tension, and winding or unwinding it requires proper winding bars — not screwdrivers, which is how most injuries happen.
• Even a broken spring can hold residual tension.
• Getting the winding wrong leaves the door unbalanced, which quietly destroys the opener over the following months.
• The cables and drums come under load in the same operation.

The parts are not expensive. What you are paying for is doing it without being hurt and without the door being wrong afterwards.

Why it broke now

Cycles, not years. Springs are rated by cycles — one open and one close. A door used four times a day accumulates roughly fifteen hundred cycles a year. Add a second driver and a teenager and it is far more. Two identical houses on the same street can be five years apart.

Cold mornings. Kingman freezes in winter in a way Phoenix does not, and spring failures cluster on the first genuinely cold mornings. Steel contracts and is slightly more brittle, and a spring already at the end of its life picks that moment.

Rust from monsoon humidity pits the coil surface and gives fatigue cracks somewhere to start.

Both springs, or one?

If your door has two, replace both. They were installed together, have done the same number of cycles, and the survivor is usually only weeks behind. The extra spring costs far less than a second call-out.

Worth asking about high-cycle springs while the technician is there. They cost somewhat more and are rated for several times the cycles. On a door that gets heavy daily use, that arithmetic works out.

What it typically costs.