How to Tell if You Have Broken Garage Door Springs in Austin, TX
You wake up at 6:45 on a Tuesday morning, and you’re driving down MoPac. You press the button on your garage door remote and nothing happens. The garage door opener won’t lift your garage door. Or maybe you’re loading up the truck for a weekend at the lake on Friday afternoon, and your garage door rises about two inches, shrieks, then stops. No matter how you end up with your car trapped in the garage, you’ve got a frustrating situation.
While many homeowners point fingers at the opener (it’s the loudest component in the system, it comes with a remote, and everyone knows it by name), it’s not the opener’s job to do the heavy lifting. That job belongs to your springs. A residential garage door in Austin can weigh anywhere from 150 pounds to 400 pounds. The springs offset all of that weight. The garage door opener’s only job is to move a door the springs have essentially made weightless. When a spring breaks, the garage door opener is forced to lift the door’s full weight on its own. It cannot.
In this post we’ll cover how to recognize when you have broken garage door springs in Austin, TX. We’ll explain why springs break and what you should do when you find out yours has broken.
5 Signs You Have a Broken Garage Door Spring
1. You Heard a Loud Bang From the Garage
This is probably the telltale sign that people remember after the spring breaks. Because a torsion spring is holding so much potential energy, when the steel snaps, all of that energy is released at once. People report hearing it like a gunshot, a firecracker exploding, or like something heavy falling off a shelf onto the floor.
Usually, this occurs in the middle of the night or when no one is inside the garage. That’s why most people will hear the bang, walk outside to investigate, find nothing appears wrong, and go back to bed. Of course, your door will fail to open the next morning. If you heard a loud bang from the garage recently for no reason, check your springs first.
2. The Door Will Not Open, or Lifts a Few Inches and Stops
Newer openers have force sensors built in. When the motor detects more resistance than it’s designed for, it reverses back instead of burning out. A broken spring makes the door hundreds of pounds heavier than the opener thinks it should be, triggering the safety mechanism almost immediately.
Some openers won’t budge the door. Others will groan and struggle, pulling it up six or eight inches before slamming back down. If both the remote and wall button produce the same behavior—a motor that hums, strains, or clicks but doesn’t actually move the door—chances are the problem isn’t the opener.
3. You Can See a Gap in the Spring
While not 100% definitive since broken springs sometimes slide side-to-side rather than breaking clean through, you can confirm a broken spring just by looking at it. Park inside the garage with the door closed and examine the large spring mounted horizontally above the door.
A good torsion spring is one continuous coil stretched tight from end to end. When one breaks, you can see a wide gap between where the coils used to overlap. It will typically be an inch or two wide, indicating where the spring broke cleanly in two. Once you know what to look for, it’s pretty unmistakable. Use a flashlight if your garage is dark. Don’t lean, step on the overhead section, or touch/poke/pull on the spring itself.
If you have two torsion springs, check both of them. They don’t break very often, but it’s possible to have one break while the other remains intact. Your door will still be very unsafe to try and use until both are replaced.
4. Loose, Slack, or Unspooled Cables
The torsion springs and the cables that lift the door are one integrated system that’s always under extreme tension. If a spring breaks, that tension is released and cables dangling down each side of the door immediately go slack.
Search for cable that looks loose or dangling away from the track. Does either cable appear tangled or off the drum at the top corner of the door? Do you see cable that has slipped down and started winding around the metal shaft up top? A cable that has literally unwound itself off the drum is a dead giveaway that you just blew your spring. Don’t attempt to rewind the cable by hand. While those drums are spinning loose just like any other wheel on the planet, they’re also part of the same tensioned assembly and can snap back if you try to touch them without the proper tools and knowledge. That’s how people injure themselves!
5. A Heavy or Crooked Door
Your door may not use torsion springs. Some still use extension springs instead. Located on either side of the door and running parallel to the track, extension springs aren’t quite as easy to inspect for damage.
But like their torsion cousins above the door, extension springs lose tension when they break. When one side breaks and the other doesn’t, your door is suddenly heavier on one side than the other and will hang crooked in the tracks.
If you’re able to raise your door several feet by hand with the opener disconnected, that’s a good sign that your door is properly balanced. If one spring breaks and you try this test, you’ll know it right away. The door will feel extremely heavy and fall right back down once you release it. Again, we advise against trying this for that reason: a falling door has killed fingers, smashed wrists, and really anything else that got in its way. If your door already feels far heavier than it should, you have your answer. Leave it closed and call a technician.
Why Do Garage Door Springs Break?
One common misconception about springs is that the homeowner did something to cause it. Garage door springs are wear items just like your brake pads. They’re designed to eventually fail. Here are a few things in Central Texas that can kickstart that process sooner.
They Have a Life Cycle, and You Are Spending It Daily
Spring life expectancy is measured in cycles. A cycle equals the door going up one time and down once. A typical builder-grade spring is designed to last around 10,000 cycles.
Think you’ll never hit that number? Let’s do the math. If you open your garage four times per day, you’ll run through roughly 1,460 cycles per year. Crunch those numbers, and you get seven to nine years for an average spring. Teenagers? Home-based businesses? Second vehicle? Entering/Exiting your home through the garage? Those years start stacking up, and you can easily meet your spring’s demise in half the time. Springs in homes that are approaching 10 years with the original equipment are on borrowed time.
Central Texas Weather Is Hard on Steel
We do not have weather that is kind to springs. High humidity levels in Austin leave moisture on exposed steel, and rust will form when there is moisture on steel. Surface rust creates microscopic pits in the coil, which become stress risers that can lead to cracks when the spring is put under tension. Wide temperature fluctuations don’t help. Garages can reach 110 degrees in August, then fall below freezing when it snows in January and each time the metal heats or cools, it expands or contracts. Metal fatigue is exacerbated by the constant movement, which is why springs fail on the first really cold day of the year more often than not. Cold isn’t usually the cause of failure, but it’s typically the final factor that stresses a worn spring past the point of no return.
Skipped Maintenance Speeds It All Up
All a spring needs is a few dollars’ worth of garage door lubricant applied once or twice a year. It prevents rust and allows the metal to move without rubbing against itself.
It also helps if the door is balanced. An out-of-balance door puts more stress on one spring, causing that side to wear prematurely. Annual inspections can reveal a stretched spring, worn cable, or a door out of level long before it turns into an I-can’t-get-to-work day.
Why Spring Repair Is Not a DIY Job
Plenty of garage door maintenance is homeowner-friendly. Tightening a hinge, replacing a weather seal, realigning a photo eye, lubricating the rollers — all reasonable Saturday projects. Springs are the exception, and it is not close.
The Tension Is the Danger
A typical double door’s torsion spring is preloaded with about 30 turns of tension. That spring is resisting several hundred pounds of door weight. It matters not if the door is open or closed. Whether the garage door opener is plugged in or not. That tension is there all the time until someone intentionally and knowingly releases it.
When that tension is suddenly released unintentionally, it has to go somewhere. Garage door spring accidents commonly send people to the emergency room with broken hands, serious cuts, and head injuries. These are not the kind of injuries you shake off and finish the job with.
It Takes the Right Tools and the Right Parts
Repairing garage door springs in Austin the right way calls for hardened winding bars sized to the spring cone, not a screwdriver or a piece of rebar off the garage shelf. It also takes knowing exactly how many quarter-turns your door needs, and that number depends on the weight of the door, its height, and the size of the drums.
Then there’s the spring itself. Springs are specified by wire gauge, inside diameter, length, and wind direction. Two springs can look identical sitting on a shelf and still be completely wrong for your door. Get the specification wrong and the door is out of balance from day one, which means the new spring wears out early too.
One Mistake Turns Into a Much Bigger Bill
Homeowners tend to overlook this fact. Every time you press the remote and cross your fingers that the door will eventually decide to work, your opener is laboring under a weight it was never intended to lift. Gear teeth strip, sprockets shear, circuit boards fail. Replacing a spring is routine service call. Replacing a spring and opener is a whole different story.
The same can happen if you install the wrong spring yourself. An unbalanced door will chew up rollers, bend the track, wear out the opener, and even break cables. What started as one inexpensive part can silently become four.
What to Do Right Now
If the symptoms above describe what you are experiencing, walk away three steps before proceeding.
- Leave the door in its current position. A stuck door is a safe door. If it is stuck open, remain clear of the door and keep the opening accessible until help arrives.
- Disconnect the opener. Pull the plug out of the ceiling outlet so nobody can accidentally activate it with a remote, wall button, or phone app while they are working on you. This also protects the opener’s gears from additional damage.
- Keep kids, pets, and vehicles away from the door. The door itself, the cables, and even the remaining spring are all under tremendous tension. Consider every component magnified to be live until repairs have been made.
Don’t force a closed door with the emergency release if your car is trapped inside. On a door with a broken spring, that red rope disconnects the opener and leaves you with several hundred pounds of dead weight with no tension applied to counterbalance it.
Call Two Brothers Garage Doors
With over 15 years of experience fixing broken garage door springs in Austin TX we have serviced over 10,000 doors throughout the Austin–Round Rock metroplex. Here’s what you can expect when you call us about your spring:
- Technicians who specialize in springs. Installing or repairing springs is precise work. Our technicians have the right winding bars on their trucks. They will measure your door, they won’t estimate. We’ll make sure it’s balanced before we leave your driveway.
- Springs that will outlast your vehicle. We only install springs that are rated for more than the industry standard 10,000 cycles. That way, your next spring replacement is many years away instead of just a few. Plus, if your door has two springs, we suggest replacing both of them. The second spring isn’t “new”; it’s the same age as the first spring.
- Fast service, seven days a week. We answer the phone at 24/7 because we know you don’t schedule being stranded at night or on weekends. Call today!
- Coverage across the metro. Austin, Round Rock, Cedar Park, Georgetown, Pflugerville, Leander, Hutto, Kyle, Buda, Lakeway, Bee Cave, Dripping Springs, San Marcos, Manor, Bastrop, Elgin, Jarrell, West Lake Hills, and Del Valle. Call Today!
Schedule Your Garage Door Spring Replacement in Austin
Don’t let another day be wasted waiting to get your car out. Call 512-309-0852 or send us a request via our contact page. We’ll make sure your door is operating properly and your car is out of the driveway where it belongs.
