Your garage door spring just broke. Here is what to do next.

Most people meet their garage door spring exactly once, on the day it fails. Until then it is an anonymous metal coil on a shaft above the opening, doing the single most important job in the assembly. When it goes, it tends to go all at once, and the noise is loud enough that people often come out expecting to find something fell off a shelf.

How to know it is the spring

Look at the shaft running horizontally above the door, on the inside of the garage. A torsion spring sits on that shaft as a tightly wound coil. If it has failed, you will see a clean gap of two or three inches in the coil, as though somebody cut a section out. On a double door with two springs, one may look perfect and the other broken. That still counts as a failure.

The behaviour is just as telling. A door with a broken spring either refuses to move at all or lifts a few inches and stops dead. If you are using the opener, it may strain, groan, and give up. Some openers will lift a broken door partway and then let it come back down faster than you would like.

A different symptom points somewhere else. If the door goes up crooked, with one side hanging noticeably lower, that is more likely a snapped cable. If it comes off the track entirely and hangs at an angle, stop using it immediately, because a door in that state can drop.

What to do in the first ten minutes

Leave the door closed. If it is already closed, that is the best position it can be in, and there is nothing to gain by wrestling it open. If the door is stuck open and you need to secure the garage, that becomes an emergency call rather than a next week job.

Do not keep pressing the opener button. Every attempt on a broken spring puts the full weight of the door through a motor that was never sized to carry it. A great many replaced openers are really the casualties of somebody trying the button fifteen more times to be sure.

Unplug the opener if the door is closed. That prevents anybody else in the house from trying it, and it removes the chance of the door being lifted and dropped while somebody is underneath it.

Then take two photographs. One of the whole door from inside the garage, and one of the shaft and spring above it, close enough to see the gap. Those two pictures are usually enough for us to identify the spring size and tell you whether it is already on the van.

Why this is not a do it yourself repair

A torsion spring is a device for storing energy. When it is wound, it holds the entire weight of the door, which on a double door is often well over a hundred and fifty pounds. Releasing that energy without winding bars, or winding a new spring without knowing the correct number of turns for the door weight, is how people lose fingers and break wrists.

There is a second reason that is less dramatic but costs more money. A spring has to be matched to the weight of the specific door. Fit one that is slightly wrong and the door will appear to work, but the balance will be off, and the opener will spend every cycle lifting weight the spring was supposed to carry. That opener will fail early, and it will look like a motor problem rather than a spring problem.

The test for correct balance takes ten seconds and no tools. With the opener disconnected, lift the door by hand to waist height and let go. A properly balanced door stays roughly where you left it. A door that slams down or climbs to the top has a spring that is wrong for it.

How quickly it can be back in service

Spring replacement is ordinary work, and for a common residential door the parts travel on the van. A call in the afternoon frequently means a working door the following morning. One customer on our Google listing described a spring going at half past one on a Wednesday and the door working again by ten the next day, having sent photos that evening and got a reply the same night.

If both springs on a double door are of the same age and one has gone, it is usually worth replacing the pair. They have done the same number of cycles, and the second one is rarely far behind. That is a judgement call rather than a rule, and you should expect it to be explained rather than assumed.

Dave's Door covers Enumclaw and the surrounding King County area. Estimates are free, the labour carries a one year warranty, and emergency service is available day or night for a door that is stuck open or hanging.