Heard a bang like a gunshot from the garage, and now the door will not move? That is a snapped spring — the most common garage door failure there is, and one you should never fight past by hand.
Springs do the lifting on a garage door; the opener only guides it. A typical double door weighs 150 to 250 pounds, and when a spring lets go that whole weight has nowhere to go. Hauling the door up by hand, or letting the opener grind against it, is how bent tracks, snapped cables, burned-out openers and crushed fingers happen. Leave it down and call.
Springs are rated in cycles rather than years — about 10,000 for a standard spring, or roughly seven to ten years of normal use. Tucson does not have the cold-snap failure pattern that drives spring calls in northern markets. What it has instead is a daily thermal cycle: a garage that sits at 118 degrees in the afternoon and drops thirty degrees or more overnight, every day, for months. Steel expands and contracts through that, and the cumulative effect shortens spring life.
The second factor is corrosion of a kind people do not expect in a desert. Monsoon humidity spikes hard in July and August, and a garage with a perished bottom seal lets that damp air sit against bare spring steel. Surface rust on a torsion spring is a stress riser, and stress risers are where springs break. If your springs look orange rather than grey, that is worth mentioning when you call.
Most Tucson homes built from the 1980s on run torsion springs: the wound coil on a steel shaft above the opening. Older properties — midtown, Sam Hughes, and plenty of detached garages around the university — often still run extension springs stretched along the horizontal tracks. We carry both. On an extension setup the first thing we check is whether a safety containment cable runs through the spring; if not, that is the priority fix, because an extension spring under tension can whip when it fails.
On a two-spring door, both. Springs wear by cycles, and the one that did not break has done exactly the same mileage as the one that did. Replacing the pair on the same visit costs a little more in parts and saves you a second service call within the year. We will say that plainly rather than quietly doing one and waiting for you to call back.
We confirm the failure, quote a firm price before touching a wrench, fit correctly sized cycle-rated springs, rebalance the door so it holds position halfway on its own, test the safety reversal, and lubricate the hardware with a product that will not thin and run in summer heat. Most spring jobs take about an hour, and afterwards the door lifts like it is new — because properly balanced springs are what new felt like.
No. The spring carries the door's full weight, 150 to 250 pounds on a typical double door. Forcing it up by hand or with the opener risks injury and usually causes more damage. Leave it down and call.
On a two-spring door, both. The unbroken one has the same cycle count as the one that failed, so it is next. Doing the pair on one visit costs little more and saves a second call.
Standard springs are rated around 10,000 cycles, roughly seven to ten years of normal use. Tucson's daily thirty-degree thermal swing and monsoon humidity against bare steel both shorten that. High-cycle springs are available if the door is your main entrance.
Monsoon humidity. July and August bring real moisture, and a garage with a cracked bottom seal lets damp air sit against the springs. Surface rust creates the stress point where a spring eventually breaks.
Related: Cable Repair · Off-Track Repair · Repair Cost Guide
Same-day torsion and extension spring replacement across the Tucson metro.
