Published 2026-05-04 · Madison Garage Door Pros

Broken Garage Door Spring: What to Do Right Now

Quick answer: You can almost always spot a broken garage door spring yourself. There is a visible gap in the coil, the door feels twice as heavy, and the opener strains or refuses to lift it. Do not try to replace it yourself. A loaded torsion bar stores several turns of energy and can break a wrist or worse if it unwinds the wrong way. A repair usually costs $220 to $420 depending on whether you need one spring or a matched pair, and same-day repair is often possible when parts are on hand. Call us and leave the door alone until then.

How to tell if your spring is broken

Four signs sort this out fast. Most homeowners spot at least two of them within a minute of walking into the garage.

The first sign is the gap. Look at the spring, or the pair of springs, mounted on the bar above the door. A healthy spring is a tightly wound steel coil with no daylight between the turns. A broken spring has a clean two-inch to four-inch gap where the coil has separated. The break is usually easy to see from across the garage. If you find the gap, the diagnosis is done.

The second sign is weight. If you can see a gap in a spring, skip this and call. Otherwise, pull the red manual release rope, which hangs from the opener trolley, then try to lift the door by hand. A balanced 16-foot insulated steel door weighs about 140 to 170 pounds and should feel like lifting a heavy suitcase. With the spring broken, you are lifting the full dead weight, which is roughly twice that. If the door feels stuck to the floor or slams shut the moment you let go, the spring system is no longer holding any of the load.

The third sign is opener behavior. A door opener is built to assist a counterweighted door, not to lift dead weight. With a broken spring, the opener motor will hum, strain, and either stop after a few inches or trip the safety reverse and drop back down. Some openers throw an error code; many just refuse to move. If the door rises an inch and stops, that is the opener telling you the load is wrong.

The fourth sign is the bang. A torsion spring failure makes a sharp noise, often described as a gunshot or a bat hitting a steel pole. The sound carries through the house. If you woke up to a loud noise and now the door will not work, that bang was the spring releasing its stored energy in a fraction of a second.

Why DIY spring replacement is genuinely dangerous

A torsion spring on a residential garage door is wound to several turns of tension before it ever lifts a door. That stored energy is what counterweights the door so the opener can move it with a small motor. The energy does not go away when the spring breaks. It stays trapped in the coil and in the torsion bar.

When a trained tech replaces a torsion spring, two steel winding bars go into the cones at the end of the spring. The tech unwinds the old spring under controlled tension, then winds the new spring back up the same way. If a winding bar slips out of the cone, or the cone fails, or the wrong-gauge bar gets used, that bar becomes a steel lever flying at speed. Common injuries when a spring lets go the wrong way include broken wrists, broken hands, and facial injuries. Some of these accidents are fatal.

Extension springs are not as dangerous as torsion springs, but they carry their own risk. An extension spring works like a giant stretched rubber band made of steel. If it lets go, or a tech releases it with no safety cable in place, the spring can snap toward whatever stands in front of it. That is exactly why every extension spring needs a cable running through it.

The tooling matters too. Proper winding bars are sized to the cone diameter on your specific spring, made of forged steel, and not interchangeable with screwdrivers, rebar, or pieces of conduit from the hardware store. A substitute tool that bends, slips, or shears is how most DIY spring injuries happen.

Torsion vs extension: which one broke?

The visual difference is easy to spot once you know what to look for. Walk into the garage with the door closed and look up.

A torsion spring sits on a horizontal steel bar mounted along the wall directly above the closed door. Most modern Madison garages built after 1985 have torsion springs, sometimes one for a 9-foot single door and sometimes a matched pair for a 16-foot double door. The bar runs the full width of the door. If you see one or two tight coils on a bar above the header, that is torsion.

An extension spring runs parallel to the horizontal tracks on each side of the door, up near the garage ceiling. Older single-car detached garages, and many ranch homes built in the 1970s, often still have extension setups. There are two springs, one per side, each stretched along its track, with a safety cable threaded through the middle of each spring.

The weight difference per type matters when we quote the job. Torsion systems handle heavier doors more safely and last longer per dollar spent. Extension systems are cheaper to install up front but are more prone to whip failure and require a safety cable in every install. We replace both kinds. If your door has extension springs and you want it converted to torsion during the repair, that is worth discussing on the same visit.

What NOT to do in the meantime

Three things to avoid until a tech is there.

Do not keep hitting the opener button hoping it will eventually go up. The motor is sized for an assisted lift, not a dead lift. Every cycle you force on a broken-spring door burns motor windings, strips gears, and can pull the rail off the ceiling brackets. Repeated forcing can turn a simple spring repair into a spring-plus-opener-plus-rail repair, which costs a lot more.

Do not lift the door by hand if the cables look stretched, frayed, or unspooled from the drum. When a spring snaps, the cables briefly take the full load alone. Sometimes they survive intact, sometimes they stretch or jump the drum, and occasionally one parts entirely. A door with a compromised cable can drop suddenly while you are holding it up, and the cable can whip when it lets go. Look at both cables from end to end before you put a hand on the door.

Do not park your car inside if the door is stuck at the top and you suspect a cable is bad. A door stuck open with a failing cable is a several-hundred-pound steel object waiting to fall. Back the car out slowly, watching the door, park it on the driveway or street, and leave the bay empty until a tech has inspected the cables and the spring system.

What to do right now

Three steps, in this order.

Step one: pull the manual release rope. The red plastic handle hangs from the opener trolley along the ceiling. Pull it down and toward the back of the garage. This disconnects the door from the opener so the motor stops fighting the broken spring. If the door is closed, leave it closed.

Step two: secure the door in the closed position if it is not already there. With the spring broken and the opener disconnected, the door will not stay up on its own. If it is open, either lower it carefully with two people supporting the weight, or wait for the tech. If it is already closed, locking the manual slide latch, if your door has one, is a good idea. Some homeowners with detached garages also slip a 2x4 vertically between the door and the floor track as a wedge while they wait.

Step three: call us. We serve Madison, Middleton, Verona, Sun Prairie, and Fitchburg. We carry common spring sizes on the truck, so most spring jobs get diagnosed and finished in one visit, often inside 90 minutes.

Why your spring lasted only 6 to 8 years in Wisconsin

The box says 10,000 cycles. Here is what that means in real life.

A spring cycle is one full open and close. Most households cycle the door four to six times a day: out for work, home again, kids out, kids home, maybe an extra trip for groceries or trash. At five cycles a day, that works out to close to 1,800 cycles a year. A spring rated for 10,000 cycles comes out to roughly five to seven years at that pace.

Wisconsin winters add some wear. Cold steel handles stress differently than warm steel, and a garage that swings from below zero to indoor temperature every day puts extra strain on the coil. That is one reason we recommend replacing both springs on a two-spring door at once. Both springs have lived through the same winters, so if one has failed, the other is not far behind.

We also recommend maintenance every two years, or every year if the door cycles many times a day. A tune-up adjusts spring tension, lubricates rollers and bearings, and checks the cables, which helps the springs and hardware last as long as they can.

What the repair actually involves and what it costs

A typical broken-spring visit looks like this. The tech arrives, secures the door, inspects the spring system, and quotes the job before any work starts. The estimate is free.

For the replacement itself, the tech disconnects the cables from the drums, releases the tension on the remaining spring if there is one, removes the old springs, slides the new springs onto the torsion bar in the right orientation, reconnects the cables, and winds the new springs to the turn count your door needs. The whole job usually takes an hour to an hour and a half for a standard single-bay door, a bit longer for a 16-foot double door or a high-lift conversion.

Pricing in the Madison metro usually looks like this:

Single torsion spring replacement: usually $220 to $320 all-in.
Matched pair (recommended on two-spring doors): usually $320 to $420.
Extension spring replacement: usually $180 to $280 per side, or per pair depending on setup.

These are reference ranges, not firm quotes. The final number depends on your door's weight, the spring gauge it needs, and whether the cables or drums also need replacement, which happens on a small share of broken-spring jobs. The tech will quote the full job before starting any work.

Frequently asked

How did my spring break if it sounded fine yesterday?

Springs almost never warn you first. The steel coil holds constant tension, and years of Wisconsin freeze-thaw cycles slowly fatigue the metal. The break itself happens fast. One more cycle and the coil snaps, often with a bang that sounds like a small gunshot. If you heard a loud noise overnight and woke up to a door that will not open, that bang was the spring letting go. You did not miss a maintenance step. The coil was simply at the end of its life.

Can I just replace the broken spring and leave the other one?

On a two-spring door, we recommend replacing both at once. The springs went in together and carried the same load through the same winters. The second spring is close to the end of its life too, often within months. Replacing only the broken one usually means a second visit later. A matched pair usually runs $320 to $420, which costs less than two separate repair visits.

Is it safe to back my car out if the spring is broken?

Only if the door is fully closed and you can leave it closed. Do not try to lift the door by hand to get the car out. With the spring broken, the door weighs about twice what the springs were designed to balance. For a 16-foot insulated steel door, that is 280 to 340 pounds of dead lift. The cables are also under extra strain and can fail without warning. If your car is trapped inside, call us for help getting it out safely.

What is the cost difference between torsion and extension repair?

Extension springs cost less to replace because the parts cost less and the labor is a bit faster. An extension swap usually runs $180 to $280. Torsion springs cost more because the steel is heavier gauge and the install needs careful winding under tension. A single torsion spring usually runs $220 to $320, and a matched pair runs $320 to $420. Either price includes a quick check of the rest of the door so you know what else might need attention soon.

Will a new spring last another 6 to 8 years?

Most residential springs are rated for about 10,000 cycles. One cycle is one full open and close. A household that cycles the door four to six times a day gets roughly five to seven years out of a new spring. Wisconsin winters add some wear, since cold steel handles stress differently than warm steel, but the cycle math above is still the best way to plan.