Are My Garage Door Springs Dangerous?

Short answer: yes, and more than almost anything else attached to your house. Not because they fail often, but because of what they are holding when they do.

A double garage door weighs somewhere between 130 and 180 kilos. The opener does not lift that - it could not. The springs do. All the opener does is guide a door that the springs have already made almost weightless. Which means that at any given moment, sitting quietly above your car, there is a steel coil storing enough energy to lift a small piano.

The two kinds, and why it matters which you have

Torsion springs sit on a horizontal steel shaft above the door opening. They wind up as the door comes down. When one breaks, it usually stays on the shaft - you get a loud bang and a door that will not lift, which is alarming but rarely injures anyone.

Extension springs run along the horizontal tracks at either side, stretching as the door closes. These are the ones with the reputation. When an old extension spring lets go, it can travel - across the garage, through drywall, into whatever is parked underneath.

If your extension springs have no safety cable running through them, that is the single most useful thing to fix on your door.

A safety cable threads through the middle of an extension spring and is anchored at both ends. When the spring breaks, the cable catches the pieces. They cost very little and they are the difference between a bang and a hole in something. Look along your tracks - if you see a spring with no cable through it, call someone.

What actually causes a spring to fail

• Cycles, not years. A standard spring is rated for around 10,000 open-and-close cycles. A household that uses the garage as its front door gets through that in seven years or so. One that opens it twice a week takes decades.
• Cold snaps. Steel contracts and gets marginally more brittle. This is why so many springs go on the first properly cold morning of the year, and why we get a run of calls every January.
• Rust. Coastal air - Steveston, Tsawwassen, anywhere near the water - pits the coil and gives fatigue somewhere to start.
• An unbalanced door. If the pair are mismatched, one carries more than its share and fails early. Which is exactly why we replace them in pairs.

The warning signs

• A visible gap of an inch or two in a torsion coil
• The door feels suddenly, impossibly heavy by hand
• It lifts a foot and stops, or drifts back down
• One side rises before the other
• The opener strains, clicks and gives up
• It slams the last stretch instead of settling

Why we will not talk you through doing it yourself

We are generally happy to tell people what they can handle themselves. Photo eyes, remotes, lubrication, even a roller - go ahead. Springs are the one place we stop.

Winding a torsion spring means holding several hundred foot-pounds of torque on two steel bars, in a controlled sequence, with your face somewhere near it. The bars have to be the correct diameter for the cone. If one slips, it moves faster than you can. The tooling matters, the technique matters, and there is no partial credit.

It is also not an expensive repair by the standards of house maintenance, which makes the risk calculation fairly one-sided.

How long a new set should last

Standard springs are rated around 10,000 cycles. High-cycle springs run to 25,000 or more and cost meaningfully less than twice as much - so if your garage is how you get into the house, they are usually the better arithmetic. We will tell you which side of that line you are on.