7 Signs of a Broken Garage Door Spring (and What Not to Do Next)

Repairs · Updated 2026-02-11 · Rite Lift Garage Doors

A torsion spring does almost all the lifting on a garage door. When one fails, everything downstream — opener, cables, tracks — starts taking punishment it was never designed for.

Most people find out their spring has broken the same way: a bang loud enough to be heard from inside the house, then a door that will not move. Sometimes the failure is quieter and slower, and the warning signs stack up for weeks before the break.

The seven signs

1. A loud bang from the garage with nobody in it

A torsion spring holds a large amount of stored energy. When the steel fails, it releases all of it at once against the shaft and the ceiling. If you heard a bang and the door now will not lift, this is almost certainly what happened.

2. A visible gap in the coil

Look at the spring mounted on the bar above the door opening. A healthy spring is a continuous tight coil. A broken one has an obvious two-to-four inch gap where the steel separated.

3. The door feels impossibly heavy

Pull the red emergency release and lift by hand. A balanced double door should feel like lifting eight to ten pounds. With a broken spring you are lifting the raw weight of the door — often 150 to 400 pounds. If it will not budge, stop.

4. The opener strains, hums, then gives up

Openers are sized to move a balanced door, not to lift a dead one. If the motor runs for a second or two and stops, or the door rises a few inches and drops back, the spring is doing none of its job. Continuing to press the button is how a spring problem turns into an opener repair as well.

5. The door opens crooked

On a two-spring setup, one broken spring leaves the other pulling unevenly. The door rises at an angle, binds in the tracks, and can pull itself off the track entirely.

6. Loose or slack cables

When spring tension disappears, the lift cables go slack and can unspool from the drums. Slack cable is a reliable sign that something above it has failed.

7. The door slams the last foot

A door that drops hard at the end of its travel has lost tension — sometimes from a stretched extension spring, sometimes from a spring already cracked but not fully separated.

What not to do

• Do not keep pressing the opener button. You will strip the drive gear or burn out the motor on top of the spring bill.
• Do not park under a partly open door. With no spring tension and slack cables, gravity is the only thing holding it up.
• Do not attempt the replacement yourself. Winding bars, correct wire gauge and correct inside diameter matter. Spring work causes more serious injuries than any other part of garage door service. This is the one job on your door that is genuinely not a DIY project.

Replace one spring or both?

Both. Springs on the same door have been through the same number of cycles and have aged in the same air. Replacing only the failed one means an unbalanced door now and a second call-out within months. Standard springs are rated at roughly 10,000 cycles — about seven years for an average household. High-cycle springs run two to three times that and are worth the small upgrade if your garage is the family's main entrance.

Why Hawaii springs fail early

Salt-laden air corrodes spring steel from the outside in. A pit in the surface becomes a stress riser, and the spring fails at that point well before its cycle rating. If you live within a few blocks of the water, galvanised springs and an annual tune-up will noticeably extend the life of the whole system.

Broken spring right now? We stock the common sizes on the truck and handle spring replacement the same day across the islands, including Honolulu, Kailua-Kona, Kahului and Lihue.