April 8, 2026 · 5 min read
A broken spring rarely happens without warning. Here are seven signs to watch for before it fails completely.
A garage door spring failure is loud, sudden, and usually happens on a day you didn’t expect it. But springs almost never fail without warning: they wear out gradually, and there are usually a few weeks of small clues before the day they let go for good. If you catch the signs early, you can get it replaced on your schedule instead of dealing with a door that’s suddenly stuck shut.
Springs do the heavy lifting, literally. They counterbalance the weight of the door so the opener motor only has to do a fraction of the work. As a spring loses tension, more of that weight shifts onto the opener. If you’ve disconnected the opener and lifted the door by hand and it feels noticeably harder to lift than it used to, that’s a spring losing strength, not the door getting heavier.
If your opener motor sounds like it’s working harder than it used to (slower movement, more noise, occasional stalling partway through the cycle), it’s often compensating for a spring that isn’t doing its share. Openers aren’t built to lift a door’s full weight indefinitely, and running one that way regularly shortens the life of the motor too.
Torsion springs are mounted above the door and wound tight. If you can see a gap or separation in the coil where there shouldn’t be one, that spring has already cracked. It hasn’t fully let go yet, but it will, and often without any further warning.
Most residential garage doors use two springs working together. If one is weaker than the other, the door will visibly tilt to one side as it moves, instead of staying level. That uneven lift also puts extra stress on the tracks and cables on the stronger side.
This is the classic sign, and it usually means the spring has already broken. The bang is the sound of stored tension releasing all at once. If you hear it, don’t try to open the door with the opener. Treat it as a stop-using-it situation and call for repair.
If you lift the door manually and it drifts back down instead of staying put, the springs aren’t holding the counterbalance anymore. This is both an early warning sign and, honestly, already a repair situation: a door that won’t hold its position isn’t safe to leave half-open.
Springs are made of tightly wound steel wire, and in a Montreal garage that sees humidity, salt air, and temperature swings, they do corrode over time. Rust doesn’t just look bad: it weakens the wire and makes an already-tensioned spring more likely to snap rather than gradually loosen.
Springs are under enormous tension: that’s how they lift a 150-plus pound door with one hand. That tension is also exactly why spring work isn’t a homeowner repair; we’ll cover that in more detail in another article. If you notice any of the signs above, the safest move is to stop using the door with the opener, use the manual release only if you have to get a car out, and call a technician to inspect it.
If your door feels heavier, sounds off, or you’ve spotted a crack in the coil, call ASAP Garage Door at 514-701-8612. We’ll inspect the springs, give you a firm price, and the $30 service call is waived if you go ahead with the repair.
$30 Service Call, Waived: a technician gives you a firm price before any work starts.
Call 514-701-8612