Broken spring: how to be sure

This is the most common failure on a New Hampshire door and the most commonly misdiagnosed, because what the owner sees is an opener behaving badly.

The ten-second check

Look at the spring. It runs along a steel bar above the opening. A broken torsion spring shows a clean gap of an inch or two where the coils have separated. You do not need to touch anything to see it.

Then test the weight. With the door down, pull the opener's release cord — the red handle on the rail — and lift the door by hand. A door with healthy springs is nearly weightless and stays where you leave it. A door with a broken spring is extremely heavy and wants to slam down. If it is heavy, stop there and put it back down.

If the door will not lift at all and it is below freezing, that is a different problem. Check for ice first.

Why it is not a job to attempt

A torsion spring is wound under enough tension to counterbalance a door that weighs more than most people expect. That energy is still in the spring, and it comes out through the winding bars if they slip. The injuries from this are well documented and severe, and the tools are not the ones in a household toolbox.

There is also a quieter risk. A door whose spring has failed is held up by nothing but the opener's trolley, which was never designed as a brake. Leave it down until it is fixed, and do not park under a partly open one.

If one broke, what about the other

Most doors wide enough to take a car and a half carry two springs. Both were wound on the same day and have completed the same number of cycles, so the second is usually only weeks behind the first. Replacing a single one means paying for a second visit shortly afterwards, and the mismatch makes the door pull unevenly in the meantime.

What makes them last here

Cycles are what wear a spring out, so the honest answer is to use the door less: a household that comes and goes six times a day gets through a standard spring faster than one that uses it twice. Beyond that, two things matter in this climate.

Keep the salt off the coils. Brine carried in on a car settles everywhere, and corrosion on a spring is a stress raiser in a part that lives on stress. A rinse of the garage floor at the end of a hard winter is worth more than it sounds.

Keep it lubricated going into the cold. A light oil on the coils in late autumn lets them slide rather than grind, and it is the cheapest preventive job on the door.