Broken Spring? Don't Try to Open the Door.

A torsion spring breaking sounds like a gunshot. People call me at 11pm thinking someone fired a gun at the house. It’s almost always the spring.

If you walk into the garage in the morning and the door won’t open, the opener motor is straining and clicking, or the door is slumped on one side — stop. Don’t lift the door. Don’t try to “help” the opener. Don’t pull the emergency release.

Here’s why.

What’s actually happening up there

The torsion spring sitting horizontally above your garage door isn’t decoration. It’s a coiled steel rod under enormous winding tension — typically 25 to 30 turns of preload — that holds up the entire weight of your door.

A standard double-car door weighs 150 to 250 pounds. A custom wood or insulated steel double can weigh 300 to 400 pounds. The spring counterbalances every ounce of that. When the spring is intact, the door feels almost weightless. When it snaps, you’re staring at a piece of dead weight held only by two thin cables.

Why you don’t lift it

If you pull the red emergency-release cord on a door with a broken spring, three things can happen, all bad:

1. The door drops. That 250 lbs falls onto whatever’s underneath — your car, your foot, the dog.
2. The cables snap. With the spring gone, the cables are doing a job they weren’t designed for. When they let go, they whip. I’ve seen cable injuries to the face that needed stitches.
3. The door comes off the tracks. Now it’s a $400 job instead of a $250 job, plus possibly a new panel.

Even if you manage to muscle the door up halfway by hand, the moment you let go it falls. There’s nothing holding it up. The opener can’t either — its trolley is built to pull a door the spring is counterbalancing, not a piece of dead weight. With no spring, the trolley just snaps.

What NOT to do

I get a few of these a year, and the pattern is always the same:

• Don’t try to wind the spring yourself. I know there are YouTube videos. The tools are called winding bars for a reason — if one slips, it’ll break a wrist or a jaw. I’ve had two customers in the last decade end up in urgent care this way.
• Don’t park the car in the garage if you can avoid it. If the door has to come down for some reason, you want it landing on concrete, not a hood.
• Don’t disable the opener and use the door manually. Same problem — the second the door starts going up or down without spring support, gravity wins.

What to do

1. Leave the door where it is. Whether it’s open, closed, or stuck halfway, leave it.
2. Unplug the opener from the ceiling outlet. This stops anyone in the house from hitting the wall button or the remote and making things worse.
3. Move cars and bikes out of the path of the door, if it’s standing open.
4. Call. Most spring jobs I do same-day. The repair itself is 30–45 minutes once I’m on site.

What it costs

For a standard double-car door:

• One spring replaced — $240–$310 (parts and labor)
• Both springs replaced — $330–$420

I always recommend replacing both springs at once even if only one broke. They were installed the same day and they wear at the same rate — if one’s gone, the other is right behind it. Doing them together saves you a second service call within a year.

If your door has only one spring and it’s the long, fat one on a shaft above the door, that’s a torsion. If it has two long springs running parallel to the tracks on either side of the door (older homes), those are extension springs. Both dangerous. Same advice.

Worth doing yourself? No.

A broken spring is the one repair where DIY isn’t worth it. The part costs $35 at the supply house. The tool costs $40 at Harbor Freight. The hospital bill costs $4,000.

If you hear that bang, just call.