There was a bang like a gunshot from the garage, and now the door will not open. Almost certainly a torsion spring let go. Here is what that means and what to do next.
The opener is not what lifts your door
This surprises most people. The springs lift the door; the opener only guides it and holds it in place. A double garage door weighs somewhere in the range of a few hundred pounds, and a half-horsepower motor is nowhere near capable of raising that on its own. The springs counterbalance the weight so the opener has almost nothing left to do.
When a spring breaks, that counterbalance disappears. What is left is a very heavy panel with a small motor attached to it.
Do not force it
Two things go wrong when people keep pressing the button. The opener strains against the full weight of the door and strips its gear or snaps a cable — turning one repair into three. And if the door does come partly up, there is nothing holding it there.
If the opener is fighting the door, pull the emergency release cord to disconnect it. Then leave the door alone. If it is already open and unsupported, keep people and cars out from under it.
Why springs break
Metal fatigue, not bad luck. A standard residential spring is rated somewhere around ten thousand cycles. A family using the garage as their main entrance opens the door four to six times a day, which works through that in a handful of years, not a lifetime.
Cold weather is why so many break in December and January. Cold steel is more brittle, so a spring already near the end of its life tends to fail on a cold morning. The cold did not cause the wear, it just chose the timing.
And in New Jersey there is a second factor: road salt. Brine carried in on the car drips onto the hardware all winter and corrodes it considerably faster than plain water. Rinsing the bottom of the door and the tracks a few times over the winter genuinely extends their life.
Why this is not a DIY repair
We say this about very few jobs. Torsion springs store an enormous amount of energy in a tightly wound state, and releasing or winding one without the correct bars and technique is how people lose fingers and worse. Search for it and you will find plenty of emergency-room accounts.
There is a quieter failure mode too. Springs are sized to the specific weight and height of your door, and fitting the wrong rate leaves the door out of balance. It will appear to work, and it will destroy the opener over the following months.
Replace them in pairs
If your door has two springs and one broke, the other is the same age with the same cycle count and is not far behind. Replacing both costs a little more now and saves a second service call within the year. Any technician who does not raise this is not doing you a favour.
What it should take
A spring replacement on a standard residential door is typically a single visit. We carry common sizes on the truck, which is usually the difference between the door working today and waiting for a part.
Door stuck right now?
Same-day service on most broken spring calls across northern and central New Jersey.