Overview
Most residential garage doors are balanced by one or two torsion springs mounted on a steel shaft directly above the door, wound tight enough to counter almost the entire weight of the door itself. Older or lighter doors sometimes use extension springs that run along the horizontal tracks instead. Either way, those springs are only rated for a certain number of open-and-close cycles — typically somewhere around 10,000, which works out to roughly 7 to 10 years of normal use for most households before metal fatigue catches up with them.
When You Need This
You'll usually see it coming if you know what to look for: the door starts to look slightly crooked as it opens, your opener strains or grinds where it used to run smooth, or a cable that was taut now has slack in it. Sometimes there's no warning at all — just a loud bang from the garage as the spring lets go. In Jacksonville's humidity and the salt air closer to the beaches, unprotected or older springs also rust and fatigue faster than they would inland, which is one more reason a 10-year-old spring on a coastal property deserves a look even before it fails outright.
