Why Garage Door Springs Break on the First Cold Night

Every year it goes the same way. A mild autumn, a door that works fine, and then the first genuinely cold night of the season. In the morning the door will not move and there is a broken spring above it.

Cold does not wear the spring out

This is the part most people get wrong. Cold weather does not damage a healthy spring. What it does is pick the moment for a spring that was already at the end of its life.

Steel contracts as it cools. A torsion spring under several hundred pounds of tension gets slightly tighter and slightly more brittle when the temperature drops twenty degrees overnight. If that spring had a thousand cycles left in it, the cold snap spends them all at once.

Springs are rated in cycles, not years

One cycle is one open and one close. A standard spring is rated for about 10,000 of them. A household that opens the door four times a day burns roughly 1,460 cycles a year, so around seven years from a standard spring.

Three things shorten that in Upstate New York:

• Road salt. It comes home on the car, drips off in the garage, and sits on the spring surface every night from November through March. Corrosion creates a weak point, and the break happens there rather than spreading evenly.
• A single spring on a double door. Common in builder-grade installs. One spring doing the work of two wears out roughly twice as fast.
• A door that was never balanced properly. If the tension was set wrong at installation, the spring works harder on every single cycle for its entire life.

How to tell before it breaks

• The door feels heavier than it used to when you lift it by hand
• The opener strains or hums where it used to run smoothly
• The door opens crooked, or drops when you let go halfway
• You can see a gap in the coiled spring above the door

What to do when it goes

Stop using the opener. With a broken spring the door carries its full weight, which on a double door can be over 200 pounds. The opener was never designed to lift that, and forcing it strips the drive gear or bends the top section.

If a car is trapped inside, say so when you call and we will treat it as urgent.

Should you replace one spring or both?

If the door has two springs and one broke, replace both. They went on the same day with the same cycle count, so the survivor is just as tired. One visit costs less than two, and it means you are not doing this again on the next cold night.

We cover Rochester, Buffalo and Syracuse. Call (646) 960-8060 or request a free estimate.