Is Your Garage Door Spring Broken? How to Tell and What Not to Do
Updated 2026-10 · McDonough, GA
The bang
The classic sign is a sound: a single loud bang from the garage, like a heavy board dropped on concrete, often in the early morning and often on the first cold day of the winter. Nothing looks different from the house. Then the opener runs, the door rises a few inches or not at all, and the motor stops. That sequence is a broken spring nine times out of ten.
What you can see
On a torsion spring
Look at the bar running across the top of the door opening, inside the garage. A broken torsion spring has a visible gap in the coil, usually an inch or two, where it separated. On a two-spring door only one may have gone, and the other will look normal.
On extension springs
On doors with springs running along the overhead tracks, a broken one hangs loose or has pulled apart. If there is no safety cable through it, the broken end may have whipped into the ceiling or a car. Do not touch it.
Cables and the door itself
A loose cable hanging beside the track, a door sitting crooked in the opening, or a gap at one end of the bottom edge often comes with a broken spring, because the cables lost their tension when it went.
What you can feel, safely
If the door is fully closed, you can pull the red release cord and try to lift the door by its handle. With healthy springs it lifts with one hand and stays put at waist height. With a broken spring it feels like it is bolted to the floor.
Do not do this if the door is open or partly open. Releasing a door with a broken spring that is not on the ground lets it fall with its full weight, and a two-car door can be well over a hundred pounds.
What not to do
Do not keep pressing the button. An opener lifting a door without spring help strains its gear, bends the top section of the door, and can pull the rail off the ceiling.
Do not try to lift the door and prop it up to get a car out. It is far heavier than it looks and props slip.
Do not try to wind a new torsion spring yourself, whatever the videos make it look like. The stored energy in a wound spring is what makes this the dangerous part of a garage door, and the injuries from a slipped winding bar are serious.
Do unplug the opener, keep children and pets out of the garage, and call.
A broken spring with the car inside is the call local garage door companies try hardest to fit in the same day. Call, say it was a bang, and say whether the door has one spring or two.
Why it happened now
Springs are rated in cycles, usually about ten thousand for the standard ones builders fit. A family that uses the garage as the front door gets through that in roughly seven years. Cold is the usual last straw: steel near the end of its life tends to fail on the coldest mornings. Across Henry County a lot of houses from the 1990s and 2000s are on their second or third set of springs, which is why the first freeze of each winter brings a run of calls.
Where to go next
Common questions
Can a door work with one of its two springs broken?
It may move a little on the opener, but it should not be used. The remaining spring is not strong enough on its own, and the strain falls on the opener and the door.
How long do garage door springs last?
Standard springs are rated for about ten thousand cycles, which is around seven years at four cycles a day. High-cycle springs are rated for two or three times that.
Is a broken spring an emergency?
It is urgent rather than dangerous, as long as nobody tries to force the door. If the door is stuck open, the house is not secure, which makes it more urgent.