Atlanta, GA
Broken torsion spring on your Atlanta home? We work on the 1960s-70s stock common across the metro and carry the sizes those doors actually use.
Symptoms
The door won't lift, or it lifts a few inches and stops. Maybe it slammed down hard on the way closed, or the opener is straining and making a grinding noise before it gives up.
Sometimes there's a loud bang from the garage first - that's the spring letting go. On a lot of the doors we see across the Atlanta area, the torsion spring sits on a shaft above the door, and once it snaps, the door is dead weight.
Two people lifting it by hand will barely move it, and trying anyway is how fingers get pinched and backs get hurt. If your opener still hums but the door doesn't move, that's usually the same problem - the motor isn't built to lift a door with no spring tension helping it.
This is the single most common call we get for driveway-facing doors on houses built in the decades right after the interstates went in around here, and it doesn't announce itself ahead of time. One day the spring is fine, the next day it isn't.
On the truck
We stock torsion springs in the wire sizes and lengths that match the door heights common on houses built from the 1950s through the early 2000s - that covers most of what's still on the road across the metro's 36 named areas. That means single doors, standard double doors, and the taller carriage-style doors that showed up on newer builds. We also carry the safety cables that run through the spring, since a spring under tension without a cable is a hazard we won't leave a job without fixing. What we don't always carry on the first trip is a spring for an oversized custom door or a door with a non-standard drum size - those sometimes have to be special-ordered, and we'll tell you straight if that's your situation rather than force a mismatch onto your shaft.
Local causes
Torsion springs are rated for a number of open-close cycles, and they wear on a schedule tied to age, not mileage. With median housing stock here dating to 1978 and a lot of it built in the 1960s and 70s, a large share of doors in the area are carrying original or first-replacement springs that are decades past their expected cycle count.
Add the climate: this is a cold-moderate band, meaning the metal goes through real temperature swings across the year, expanding and contracting slightly with every hot summer and cold snap.
That thermal cycling adds stress on top of the mechanical stress from daily use. It's not one dramatic event that snaps a spring - it's forty years of small ones.
Houses built closer to 2004 tend to have galvanized springs that hold up a little longer, but plenty of the older stock still has the original coil, and those are the calls that come in without warning.
The repair
We match the spring to your door's weight and height rather than guessing off a chart, because a spring that's slightly wrong will either fight the opener or let the door drop too fast. We replace both springs on a double-torsion setup even if only one broke - the second one is on the same clock and rarely worth leaving in. We check the cables, the drums, and the bearing plates while we're up there, since a spring failure sometimes takes a cable partway with it. The job itself, once we're on site with the right spring, generally runs under an hour of actual wrench time; the variable is what we find once the door's opened up. If the shaft is bent or the drums are cracked, that's a different repair and we'll say so before starting rather than after the invoice.
Questions
If the door barely moves, or the opener strains and clicks off, the spring is the likely cause - the opener isn't built to lift a door with no spring assist. If the opener runs but the door doesn't budge at all, that can point elsewhere, but a snapped spring is the most common reason a door in this area suddenly won't lift.
You can leave the door down and avoid using it, but don't force it open by hand or run the opener against it - that strains the opener motor and risks the cables. Given the age of a lot of springs still in service across the metro, it's not worth pushing a failing one further.
On a double-torsion setup we replace both, even if only one broke. They're installed at the same time and wear on the same schedule, so leaving the old one in usually just means a second call within a year or two.
Usually the replacement matches what's already on the door, sized to its weight and height. Occasionally a door was under-sprung from the start, which shows up as the door being hard to lift by hand even before anything broke - we'll flag that if we see it.
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Atlanta Garage Door Pros repairs and installs garage doors, springs and openers in Atlanta, GA and the surrounding area.
