Aurora, CO
Broken torsion spring on a house built between 1958 and 2005? Aurora's cold winters and original hardware are a common combination. Here's what the repair involves.
Local causes
Torsion springs are rated for a set number of open-close cycles, and cold makes that number shrink. Aurora sits in a severe cold climate band, and every winter the steel in a spring contracts, gets stiffer, and takes more stress per cycle than it does in July. A spring that might have lasted another year in a mild climate snaps in January here instead.
Housing age matters just as much. Homes across this service area went up mostly between 1958 and 2005, with a median year of 1981, and the bulk of that stock is 1980s and 90s construction spread across 22 named areas. A lot of those garages still run on the torsion hardware that came with the house - steel that's been cycling for three, four, sometimes five decades. Original springs weren't built to modern cycle-life standards, and nobody's swapped them because the door still opened, until the morning it didn't.
Put cold-weather stress on top of decades-old steel and you get the pattern we see over and over: a spring that holds fine on a 60-degree afternoon and lets go on a hard-freeze morning. It's not bad luck. It's the two facts of this area stacking on each other.
Booking
We work the full service area - Watkins, Foxfield, Cherry Creek, Glendale, Grand View Estates, Stonegate, Cherry Hills Village, Meridian, Commerce City, Derby, Englewood, North Washington, Bennett, Welby, Sheridan, Twin Lakes, Sherrelwood, The Pinery, Berkley, Castle Pines, Federal Heights, and Northglenn, along with the closer-in pockets around Buckley Space Force Base, Aurora Highlands, Plains Conservation Center, Tower Triangle, Prides Crossing, Green Valley Ranch, and Saddle Rock Ridge.
When you call, tell us what the door is doing - won't budge, opened partway and stopped, one side hangs lower than the other. That tells us whether we're dealing with a single broken torsion spring, a pair where one just hasn't failed yet, or something else entirely.
If your door is original to a house from the 1980s or 90s, say so; it changes what we bring on the truck, since older torsion assemblies sometimes use spring sizes and drums that current stock doesn't match one-for-one.
One honest limit: if the spring size or drum on an older setup is discontinued, we may need to order the part rather than swap it same visit. We'll tell you that on the phone, not after we've already unloaded the truck.
The repair
A torsion spring repair starts with winding down the tension on both springs safely - this is the step that hurts people who try it without the right bars, so it's not a homeowner job.
Once the springs are unloaded, we pull the old ones off the shaft, check the shaft, bearing plates, and drums for wear, and measure for the correct wire size, coil diameter, and length rather than guessing off the old part's label, since old labels fade and old parts get mismatched over the years. We replace springs in pairs.
If one side broke and the other hasn't yet, running on a single new spring puts uneven load on the opener and the track, and you'll be back to a second repair within months. New springs go on, we wind them to the correct turns for your door's weight, and we cycle the door by hand before testing it on the opener.
Last step is checking the cables and rollers while everything's open, since a spring failure sometimes takes a cable partway with it, and it's easier to catch that with the door already apart than to come back for it later.
Symptoms
The clearest sign is a door that won't lift, or lifts a few inches and stops, sometimes with a bang or a loud snap from inside the garage right before it happens.
If you try the opener and it strains, hums, or trips a breaker without moving the door, don't keep hitting the button - that's the opener trying to lift a door with no spring assist, and it can burn out the motor or strip the gear.
Other signs show up before the full break: a door that feels heavier than usual when you lift it by hand, a visible gap in the coil of the spring above the door, or one side of the door sitting noticeably lower than the other when it's down.
Any of those means a spring is close to failing, not that it already has. Don't try to force the door open or closed once a spring goes. The opener and track weren't built to carry that load alone, and forcing it usually turns a spring repair into a track and roller repair too.
Questions
Cold steel is more brittle steel. Aurora's winters put more stress on a torsion spring per cycle than warmer months do, and if that spring is original to a house built decades ago, it's already near the end of its cycle life. The cold just tends to be what finishes it.
Both, as a rule. Garage doors with two torsion springs are balanced to run as a pair. Replacing only the broken one leaves the door lifting unevenly, which stresses the opener, the track, and the second spring - and that one usually fails within months anyway.
No. Torsion springs are wound under heavy tension and letting that go wrong has put people in the hospital. If your spring is broken or close to it, the wind-down and reinstall need the right bars and the right technique, not a wrench and a ladder.
If the opener motor runs, strains, or trips the breaker but the door barely moves or won't move at all, the spring is the likely cause - the opener isn't built to lift the door's full weight alone. A door that's heavy to lift by hand, or hangs unevenly, points the same way.
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Aurora Garage Door Pros repairs and installs garage doors, springs and openers in Aurora, CO and the surrounding area.
