Heard a bang like a gunshot from the garage, and now the door will not move? That is a snapped spring. The most common garage door failure there is, and one you should never fight past by hand.
People assume the opener lifts the door. It does not. The opener is a guide motor; the counterbalance springs carry the load, and on a two-car door that load is somewhere between 150 and 250 pounds. Remove a spring from that equation and the weight has to go somewhere. Into the tracks, into the cables, into the opener's drive train, or onto whoever is underneath it.
So the instruction is short: do not try to lift it, and do not keep pressing the button hoping it catches. Every attempt after the spring goes tends to convert a one-part repair into a three-part one.
Springs are rated in cycles, not years. About 10,000 for a standard spring, or roughly seven to ten years of normal use. Colorado Springs shortens that from two directions at once.
First, cold. Spring steel loses ductility as it gets colder, so a spring already at 9,000 cycles that would have survived until spring instead fails at 6 a.m. on the first single-digit morning. Second, the daily swing. At 6,035 feet the difference between a sunny afternoon and a clear night is routinely 35 or 40 degrees, all year. That thermal cycling works the steel every single day, and it is why doors here reach the earlier end of the cycle-life window rather than the later.
Practically: valley spring failures cluster in the cold months, which is when nobody wants to be standing in an unheated garage. We carry extra spring inventory through winter, and high-cycle springs (rated 20,000 cycles or more) are worth the modest upcharge on a door used as the family's main entrance.
Most homes built from the 1980s onward run torsion springs: the wound coil on a steel shaft above the opening. Older neighbourhoods (much of Security-Widefield, older parts of the west side, and plenty of detached garages) still run extension springs stretched along the horizontal tracks. We carry both. On an extension setup the first thing we check is whether a safety containment cable runs through the spring; if not, that is the priority fix, because an extension spring under tension can whip when it fails.
Here is the arithmetic. Two springs installed on the same day have opened the same door the same number of times. If one has just reached the end of its fatigue life, the other is within a few hundred cycles of doing likewise. Weeks, in a household that uses the garage as its front door.
The incremental cost of the second spring on a visit we are already making is small. The cost of a separate call-out in February is not. We will always show you both numbers and let you choose, but we are not going to fit one spring quietly and wait for the phone to ring.
Confirm the diagnosis, put a firm price in front of you, and only then start work. Springs go on sized to your door's measured weight and rated for the cycles you actually want out of them. Then the part most shops skip: we rebalance the door until it will sit at waist height on its own, hand-test it, verify the safety reversal against an obstruction, and lubricate with a grease that does not turn to toffee at ten degrees. Budget about an hour.
No. The spring carries the door's full weight, 150 to 250 pounds on a typical double door. Forcing it up by hand or with the opener risks injury and usually causes more damage.
On a two-spring door, both. The unbroken one has the same cycle count as the one that failed, so it is next. Doing the pair on one visit costs little more and saves a second call.
Standard springs are rated around 10,000 cycles, roughly seven to ten years. Cold snaps and the wide daily temperature swing at this altitude both push failures to the earlier end. High-cycle springs are available if the door is your main entrance.
Typically $160 to $370 for a single spring and $220 to $530 for a pair, parts and labor, depending on wire gauge, length and whether the shaft or bearings also need work. We quote firm before starting.
Related: Cable Repair · Off-Track Repair · Repair Cost Guide
Same-day spring replacement across the Pikes Peak region.
