Kennewick, WA
Broken torsion spring on a Kennewick garage door? We explain why 1980s-90s builds and cold winters here wear springs out faster, and what the repair actually involves.
DIY or pro
A broken torsion spring is not a weekend project, and we'll say that plainly up front. The spring above your door is wound under enough tension to snap a wrench out of your hand or drop a 150-pound door on a foot.
If you're reading this because your door won't open, or it opens a few inches and stops, the fix is a spring swap - not an adjustment, not a lubrication job. What you can safely do yourself: look at the spring. If it's stretched with a visible gap in the coil, or one half is sitting on the floor of the garage, that's your answer.
Pull the release cord so the door is disconnected from the opener before anyone tries to force it by hand - an opener motor will burn out trying to lift a door with a dead spring. What we don't recommend: buying a spring online and winding it yourself with winding bars you borrowed.
The hardware varies by door weight and track type, and the wrong spring either won't lift the door or will over-cycle and fail again in months. This is one of the jobs in garage door work where the labor is the actual product, not the part.
Job timing
A straightforward torsion spring replacement on a standard double door usually runs under two hours once the truck is on site - removing the old spring halves, setting the new ones to the correct wind count for the door weight, and running the door through a full cycle to check balance.
Single springs on lighter single-car doors go faster. What adds time: doors where the spring failure has already damaged something else - a bent track from the door dropping unevenly, or a cable that jumped the drum when tension released suddenly.
We check both on every spring call because a spring rarely fails in isolation; it's usually the first part to go, and the stress it was carrying has to land somewhere else in the system. We size springs to the door in front of us, not off a guess.
Across the houses we work on in this area - builder-grade doors from the 1980s and 90s through newer installs - spring wire gauge and wind count vary enough that matching them wrong leads to a door that's either too heavy to lift by hand in an opener failure or one that slams down fast. That's checked on site, not estimated over the phone.
Warning signs
The most common call we get is a door that won't budge, with the opener motor humming but the door not moving - that's a dead giveaway of a snapped spring, since the opener was never built to lift the door's full weight alone.
Second most common: a loud bang from the garage, usually when nobody's home, which is the spring letting go under tension rather than wearing out quietly. Less obvious signs come earlier. A door that feels heavier than it used to when you lift it manually during a power outage.
A door that closes unevenly, one side dropping faster than the other. Cables that look loose or slightly frayed near the bottom bracket - that's often tension shifting as a spring starts to go, not a cable problem on its own.
We size the fix to what's actually failed. If it's just the spring and the door checks out balanced and square otherwise, that's the whole job. We won't sell a full opener or track replacement onto a spring call unless the inspection actually shows damage there.
Local causes
Most garage doors in this service area sit on houses built between 1981 and 2000, which means the original torsion springs on a lot of those doors are now entering their third or fourth decade of daily cycling. A torsion spring has a rated life measured in cycles, not years, and a door used twice a day for thirty-plus years runs out that rating regardless of how well it was installed.
With roughly 19,085 owner-occupied houses across the area, a lot of those original builder's-grade springs are reaching end of life around the same stretch of years, which is why spring calls cluster rather than trickle in evenly. The 1980s and 90s stock common here often used lighter-gauge springs than code requires on newer builds, and those wear sooner under the same daily use.
Cold winters add their own stress. Spring steel loses some flexibility as temperatures drop, and a spring already near the end of its cycle life is more likely to snap on a cold morning than a mild afternoon. At a median household income of $87,022, most owners here choose a same-day spring swap over living with a door that won't close, which is the call volume we plan our schedule around.
Questions
If the opener motor runs - you hear it humming - but the door doesn't move or only inches up, that's almost always a broken spring, not an opener problem. The opener isn't built to lift a door's full weight alone. If the motor doesn't run at all, that's a different issue, likely electrical or the opener itself.
On a double torsion spring setup, we replace both even if only one broke. They're wound under matched tension and installed at the same time, so the surviving one is close behind on cycle life. Replacing just one usually means a second service call within months.
Torsion springs rarely show visible wear before they go. They fail at the end of their rated cycle life, which is a function of door use, not a slow fray you can spot. Houses in this area built in the 1980s and 90s are reaching that point in similar numbers now, which is why it can feel sudden.
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Kennewick Garage Door Pros repairs and installs garage doors, springs and openers in Kennewick, WA and the surrounding area.
