How We Fix It
A broken torsion spring means the door won't lift, or it slams down hard when the opener tries. We don't patch a spring - we replace it, and on most of the double doors we see out here, that means both springs on the bar even if only one has let go. The second one is usually close behind it on the same wind cycle.
We match the spring to the door weight and the drum size on your track, not just whatever's closest in the truck. Get that wrong and the door either won't balance or it wears the opener gears down in a year. Once the new spring's on, we check cable wear on the drums, since a spring failure under tension can nick a cable on its way out, and set the door's balance by hand before we ever let the opener take the load again.
One limit worth saying straight: if the spring let go hard enough to bend a track or crack a panel, that's a separate repair, and sometimes it's cheaper to replace the section than straighten it. We'll tell you which before we start, not after.
What You Are Seeing
Most calls start the same way - the door won't budge, or it only goes up a few inches and the opener motor groans. Some folks hear the spring go before they see anything: a bang from the garage, loud enough to think something fell. After that, the door is dead weight. Lifting it by hand takes real effort, more than it should, because the spring that was supposed to carry most of that weight is gone.
A less dramatic version: the door closes unevenly, one side dropping faster than the other, which usually means one spring on a two-spring setup is still partly wound and the other has lost tension without fully snapping. That's worth a call before it does snap, usually on the side you're not watching.
Why It Happens Here
Housing across the Columbus service area mostly went up between 1972 and 2011
With the bulk of it dating to the 1980s and 90s across the two main built-out areas. Torsion springs have a rated cycle life, and a door opening twice a day for twenty-plus years runs well past that rating no matter how well the door was installed. We see a lot of original springs still in place on houses from that era, which is exactly the age bracket where failure clusters.
Climate plays a smaller but real part
The area sits in a mild band with occasional freeze days, not the deep-freeze cycling that cracks metal outright, but enough cold-to-warm swing over a winter to stiffen old lubricant and add load on a spring that's already near the end of its wind count. It's not the cause on its own - it's what tips a spring that was already due.
How to Book
Call and tell us the door won't open, or that you heard a bang - either one gets you booked for a spring job, not a diagnostic visit first. We carry common torsion spring sizes on the truck for the door types typical of this area's housing stock, so most jobs finish same visit. If your setup needs a size we don't carry, we'll say so on site rather than guess.
Have the door's rough age and whether it's a single or double door ready when you call - that's enough for us to bring the right spring the first time.
