Checking It Yourself
You don't need a tech to tell you a spring's gone. If the door won't budge past a few inches, or it drops suddenly when you pull the release, that's a torsion spring that's lost its tension. Listen for a loud bang from the garage - that's often the sound of the spring letting go, not a break-in. Look up at the bar above the door: on most houses built here between the late 1970s and the 1990s, you'll find a single torsion spring mounted on a shaft over the opening, not the older side-mounted extension springs that showed up on homes from the 1938-era end of the local stock. If the spring is torsion and you see a visible gap in the coil, or one side sagging lower than the other, it's broken. Don't try to wind it back yourself - torsion springs hold enough stored force to break a finger or worse. We don't recommend DIY spring work on any door with heavier-wound coils; the winding bars and tension involved aren't something to guess at with a wrench off the garage shelf.
What Is Going On
A torsion spring is just a tightly wound coil of steel wire holding stored energy that counterbalances the door's weight. Every cycle - open, close - puts a small amount of fatigue into that wire. Across the service area, a lot of the housing stock traces back to a median build year of 1983, which means plenty of doors out there are running on second or third springs already, installed at different times, by different people, with different wind counts. Cold makes brittle steel more likely to fracture rather than just stretch, so a spring near the end of its life is far more likely to actually break in winter than it would be to just go slack in warm months. With a median household income of $55,671 across the service area, many homeowners here choose to replace just the broken spring rather than swap both, when the second spring still has life left in it. One limitation worth being honest about: we can't tell you exactly how many cycles are left in a spring just by looking at it. Age, rust, and a visible gap in the coil tell us a lot, but cycle count isn't something you can read off the hardware.
What Changes With the Season
As the season turns, the garage itself gets colder faster than the rest of the house, since most garages here aren't insulated the way living space is. That temperature swing is bigger on an unheated slab garage than it is in a frame-built add-on, and it's the slab garages - common across the older end of the 1938-2013 build range - where we see the most sudden failures. Lubrication habits matter more in cold months too: grease that coats a roller fine in warm weather can stiffen up in a cold garage and add drag right at the moment the spring has the least reserve left to spare. If you're going to do one thing before the coldest stretch hits, it's checking that the door balances - lift it halfway by hand with the opener disconnected and see if it holds. A door that drifts down means the spring is already losing ground, and that's worth a call before, not after, it goes.
