Garage Door Spring Repair and Replacement in New Jersey

A broken spring is the most common garage door failure there is, and it is the one that stops the door dead. The springs, not the opener, carry the weight of the door. When one breaks, the opener is suddenly trying to lift 150 to 400 pounds it was never built to lift.

Call 201-621-2161 for a free estimate.

How to tell a spring has broken

  • You heard a loud bang from the garage, often overnight or on a cold morning. That is the spring letting go.
  • There is a visible gap of an inch or two in the coil above the door, or a spring lying slack along the track.
  • The door will not open, or it opens a few inches and stops.
  • The opener strains, hums, or reverses partway up.
  • The door feels extremely heavy if you pull the release cord and try it by hand. A healthy door should be liftable by one person.
  • The door goes up crooked, or one side lags behind the other.
  • The top section is bending, or the cables have come off the drums.

Torsion springs and extension springs

Torsion springs sit on a metal shaft above the door opening and turn as the door moves. Most modern doors use them, and on a wide or heavy door you will usually see two. Extension springs run along the horizontal tracks on either side and stretch as the door closes. They are more common on older installations and on lighter single-car doors.

The two are not interchangeable. Both are sized to a specific door weight, height and drum, which is why a spring that is merely close is worse than no repair at all. It will wear the opener, the cables and the door itself.

Why this is not a do-it-yourself repair

A wound torsion spring stores an enormous amount of energy. Releasing it without winding bars and the right technique is how people lose fingers and take a steel bar to the face. Extension springs under load can travel the length of the garage when a cable fails. This is the repair that sends people to the emergency room, and it is worth having someone do it who does it every day.

What a proper spring replacement involves

  • Weighing or calculating the door so the replacement spring matches it, rather than matching whatever was on there before. The original is often undersized.
  • Replacing springs in pairs on a two-spring door. The second one has the same cycle count as the one that broke and is not far behind it.
  • Checking the cables, drums, bearings and centre bracket while the door is down. A snapped spring frequently takes the cables with it.
  • Rebalancing the door so it holds position halfway up with the opener disconnected.
  • Resetting the opener force and travel limits, which are almost always wrong after a spring failure.

How long garage door springs last

Springs are rated in cycles, not years. One cycle is one full open and close. A standard spring is commonly rated at around 10,000 cycles. A household that opens the door twice a day gets many years out of that; a household with two drivers going in and out four or five times a day gets far fewer. Higher-cycle springs are available and are worth asking about if your garage door is the main door into the house, which for most New Jersey homes it is.

Cold snaps break springs. Steel contracts and gets brittle, and a spring already near the end of its life tends to fail on the first hard freeze. That is why January mornings are the busiest days of our year.

While the technician is there

If the door is old enough to be on its second set of springs, it is worth asking about the rollers and the bottom seal at the same time, and having the opener checked. A door that has been fighting a weak spring for months has usually worn other things too. If the door itself is beyond it, we also handle new door installation, and we are a dealer for every major brand: C.H.I., Clopay, Wayne Dalton, Amarr, Lynx, Genie, LiftMaster, General Doors, Artisan Door, Richard Wilcox and Haas among them.

Where we do spring work

Across all of New Jersey and into Westchester County, New York.

Every town we cover is listed on the service area page. More on everything else we fix is on the garage door repair page.

Call 201-621-2161 for a free estimate on spring replacement.

We are a dealer for every major manufacturer — see the full list of garage door brands we sell and service.

Door stuck open, stuck shut, or off its track right now? See emergency garage door repair — we take call-outs around the clock.