Garage Door Spring Repair, Done for Concord's Housing Stock

Time on the Job

A spring job is not a long visit, but it is not a rushed one either. We pull the door down to the floor, lock the track, and take the old spring off the shaft before anything else happens - torsion springs store enough force to put someone in the hospital if you skip that step. On a single door with one torsion spring, that's usually a straightforward swap. On a double door, most homes in this area run two springs on a shared shaft, and if one has broken the other is usually close behind from matched wear, so we check both before we close the truck up. Extension springs, the kind that stretch along the horizontal tracks instead of sitting above the door on a bar, are a different job entirely and still common on older openers in this area. We size the new spring to the door's actual weight - wood doors, insulated steel, and the lighter aluminum doors all pull different wire gauges - not to whatever was on the shaft before, because the old one may already have been wrong. We don't guess at cycle life or rush a mismatched spring onto a door just to get to the next call.

Why It Happens Here

Concord's housing stock runs 1938 to 2008 with a median build year of 1972, and most of what you see driving through the 39 named areas in this service territory is 1960s and 70s construction. That matters for springs specifically: doors from that era were sized for lighter wood panels, and a lot of them have since been swapped for heavier insulated steel without anyone recalculating the spring. The spring holds, undersized, for a few years, then snaps early. The region's mild temperate climate doesn't add the freeze-thaw stress that kills springs faster in colder states, so when a spring fails here it's almost always wear cycles and mismatched weight, not weather damage. That's actually good news - it means the fix is usually a correct-size spring rather than a seasonal pattern you'll fight every winter. We still see galvanized coil finish wearing thin faster than expected on doors facing west, where afternoon sun and daily heat cycling add up over three or four decades.

What You Are Seeing

A door that won't lift, or that lifts a few inches and stops, almost always means a broken torsion spring - the opener is fighting the full weight of the door with no spring assist, and most openers aren't built for that and will trip their safety reverse or burn out trying. A loud bang from the garage, often described as a gunshot, is the spring itself letting go. If you look up and see a visible gap in the coil above the door, that's confirmation, and at that point the door is not safe to operate by hand or by opener until it's replaced. A door that's noticeably heavier to lift manually than it used to be, or that closes unevenly with one side dropping faster, usually means a spring that's weakening but hasn't fully broken yet - worth replacing before it fails at a bad moment. With double springs on a two-car door, one spring can break while the door still opens, just roughly and with strain on the opener, which is the setup that burns out openers over a few months.

Can You Do This Yourself

We'll say this plainly: torsion spring replacement is not a reasonable DIY job, even for someone comfortable with tools. The spring is wound under several hundred pounds of torque, held by two set screws, and the winding bars needed to release it safely aren't something most people own or have used. We've been called out after a homeowner's attempt went wrong, and it's not a job you get a second try at if the first one goes bad. Extension springs are lower-risk to handle but still benefit from a correct-weight match, which means knowing the door's actual weight class, not guessing from what's written on the old spring's tag. What you can reasonably do yourself: watch for the warning signs above, keep the door closed and the opener unplugged if you hear a bang or see a gap in the coil, and call before anyone tries to force the door open by hand.

Frequently asked questions