Garage Door Spring Replacement

• A bang from the garage loud enough to hear from inside the house
• A visible gap in the coiled spring on the shaft above the door
• The door feels twice as heavy to lift by hand, or won't stay where you put it
• The opener strains, lifts a few inches and stops, or reverses
• The door opens crooked, one side lagging the other

If you see any of these, stop using the door. Every extra cycle with a failed spring loads the opener, the cables and the tracks, and the repair bill grows.

Torsion springs sit on a shaft above the opening and wind up as the door comes down. They're on most sectional doors and they give smoother, better-balanced travel. Replacement needs proper winding bars and the correct wire size, inside diameter and length for your door.

Extension springs run along the horizontal tracks either side and stretch as the door closes. They're common on older tilt doors and lighter sectional doors. They should always have a containment cable through them, so a snapped spring can't become a projectile — if yours don't, we fit them.

Springs on the same door have done the same number of cycles. If one has broken, the other is at the same point in its life, so replacing a single spring buys you a second call-out and a second lot of labour within months. Replacing both keeps the door balanced evenly, which is also what protects the opener.

Springs are rated in cycles — one open plus one close — rather than years, so a household that uses the garage as its main door gets through them faster than one that opens it twice a week. High-cycle springs are available if yours cop a hiding.

A torsion spring on a double door holds enough stored energy to lift the entire door. Released without winding bars, it moves faster than you can. The other half of the job is the wind: too few turns and the door won't stay up, too many and it flies open and hammers the top of the travel. It's a job for someone who does it weekly.

This is the wear pattern behind most of the repairs we do across Moreton Bay and North Brisbane, whichever suburb the door is in.

Torsion springs are rated in cycles, not years, so a door on a busy household reaches the end of its spring life somewhere around the ten to fifteen year mark and lets go without much warning — usually with a bang, and usually with the door stuck down. Because a whole street of doors of the same age gets used at roughly the same rate, they tend to reach that point together.

Two other wear items run on the same clock. Nylon rollers flatten and get noisy, which is what makes a door judder and grind on the way up, and lift cables fray where they wind onto the drum — from the inside of the strand, so a cable can look sound and still be close to letting go. Older openers start missing their travel limits over the same period. Replacing rollers and cables while the springs are being done costs far less than doing each one as it fails.

We unload the tension safely, remove the old springs, fit the correct replacements for your door's weight and drum size, check the cables and drum grooves for wear while everything is apart, wind and balance the door so it holds at any point by hand, reset the opener force if needed and test the safety reverse. Price is confirmed with you before we start.