Broken Spring? We Replace It Today.
The spring is the muscle of your garage door. The opener is just the brains — it tells the door to move, but the spring does the actual lifting. When it snaps (usually with a bang that sounds like a gunshot in the garage), your 150-to-300-pound door becomes dead weight. Don't try to force it, and don't try to fix it yourself. Call us — spring replacement is our most common same-day job in Gastonia.
What you're looking at above your door: the torsion tube, coiled spring, winding cones, cable drums, and lift cables. When the coil snaps, the whole system goes slack.
How to tell your spring is broken
- The bang. A sharp crack from the garage, often in the middle of the night as temperatures drop.
- The door won't lift — or lifts six inches and stops. The opener strains, clicks, and gives up.
- A visible gap in the coil above the door, usually about two inches wide where it separated.
- The door slams. If you disconnect the opener and the door crashes down instead of staying put, the spring isn't counterbalancing anything.
- Crooked door. With extension springs (the side-mounted kind on older doors), one side breaking makes the door hang unevenly.
Why Gastonia springs break early
A torsion spring is rated for a number of open/close cycles — usually 10,000 for builder-grade springs. In Gaston County, three local factors eat into that rating:
- Humidity and rust. Our summers are brutal on bare steel. Moisture pits the coil, and every pit is a stress point where the spring eventually fractures. We see rust-weakened springs fail at 6–8 years instead of 10–12.
- Temperature swings. Cold snaps make steel brittle; a spring already weakened by rust often lets go on the first freezing night of the year.
- Heavy daily use. If the garage is your main entrance — and in most Gastonia subdivisions it is — you're cycling that spring 4–6 times a day, not the 2 the rating assumes.
What replacement costs — and what drives it
Single torsion spring
Standard 8×7 or 9×7 residential door, one spring.
$175–$250
Pair of torsion springs
Double-wide or heavy doors run two springs — we replace both, since they age together.
$225–$350
Extension springs
Side-mounted springs on older doors. Replaced as a pair with new safety cables.
$150–$250
High-cycle upgrade
25,000-cycle springs for heavy-use doors — roughly double the lifespan for about $60–$90 more.
+$60–$90 over standard
Every spring job includes a full hardware check — cables, drums, bearings, and a balance test — because a new spring on worn-out cables is a callback waiting to happen.
Questions we hear every week
Should I replace both springs if only one broke?
Yes — on a two-spring door, both springs have lived the exact same life. The second one is typically weeks or months behind the first. Replacing both in one visit costs far less than two separate service calls.
Can I still use the door with a broken spring?
Manually lifting a door with a broken spring means handling its full weight — 150 to 300+ pounds — with no counterbalance. If it slips, it comes down hard. And running the opener against a broken spring will burn out the motor. Leave the door alone and call us.
How long does the repair take?
Most residential spring replacements take 45 minutes to an hour, including the full safety inspection and balance test.