Your Garage Door Spring Broke. No, It Can't Just Be Rewound.

The question, the way it gets asked

In Western North Carolina homeowner groups, this one shows up in two forms. The first is a bang in the night — loud enough to wake the house — and a garage door that will not move in the morning. The second is a request for someone to come rewind or reset the spring, from a homeowner pretty sure that is all that is wrong with it. Both are describing the same event: a spring has snapped. And the second one carries a misunderstanding worth correcting before it costs somebody a door — or a hand.

What the spring actually does

The spring — a torsion spring on the bar above the door, or extension springs along the tracks on some doors — is wound tight enough to counterbalance the door's full weight, often 150 to 400 pounds. Every time the door opens, the spring does the heavy lifting; the opener mostly guides it. When the spring fatigues and snaps, the coil separates and the door instantly becomes what it really is: a few hundred pounds of dead weight resting on the floor.

Why a broken spring can't be rewound

A snapped spring is broken metal — the coil has separated into pieces. There is no winding a broken coil back into a working spring, any more than a snapped rope can be re-stretched into a whole one. The spring is replaced. And the replacement is the part of this job that sends people to emergency rooms: the new spring has to be wound, deliberately loading it with the same energy that lifts your door, using winding bars, on a ladder, in front of it. If a bar slips or a set screw lets go, that energy comes back in a fraction of a second. This is the one garage door repair we will never talk a homeowner through doing themselves — not because it is complicated, but because it is unforgiving.

What to do when a spring breaks

• Don't try to lift the door by hand — without the spring it is far heavier than it looks, and it can drop.
• Don't keep running the opener — it will strain against the dead weight and can strip its drive gear or burn out its motor.
• Keep kids and pets out of the garage until it is fixed; a door sitting on a failed spring is not a stable door.
• If the car is trapped inside, that is the visit to make now — call (828) 575-4543.

What the repair visit involves

On the visit we size the new springs to your door's weight and dimensions — the wrong rating makes the door dangerous in a different way — and fit them in matched sets when your door has two, because springs age together and the second one is usually not far behind. The cables and end bearings that work with the springs get checked while we are there, and the door is balanced before we leave: a properly balanced door stays put halfway up and lifts evenly. The visit starts as our $125 service call — a technician diagnoses the door at your home, and if you go ahead with the repair, the $125 is credited in full toward it. The repair itself is quoted on the door in front of us, after the diagnosis, not guessed over the phone.

How long should springs last?

Springs are rated in cycles — one open-and-close is one cycle. Standard springs are commonly rated around 10,000 cycles, roughly 7 to 10 years for a household that uses the garage as its main entrance. Cold makes spring steel more brittle, which is why the first hard freezes in the mountains bring a run of snapped springs. If your springs are a decade old and the door is getting heavier or noisier, a tune-up & safety check can catch them before they strand the car.

Asked in Western North Carolina homeowner groups; answered by E.L Garage Door & More, Fairview, NC. More questions like this one live in the Straight answers series.