That Bang Was the Spring

A torsion spring is a steel bar under permanent load, and when it snaps it releases that load in one moment. That is the bang people hear from inside the house, often described as sounding like a gunshot or a car backfiring. Afterwards the door behaves in ways that are easy to recognize. It will not lift when the opener runs, or it rises a few inches and stops, or the opener strains and hums without moving anything. Try to lift it by hand and it feels impossibly heavy, because the spring that was supposed to make it feel weightless is now in two pieces resting on the shaft. Sometimes the door is already partway open, which is worse: it is now an unsupported weight hanging above the floor. In that state the door should not be operated, and nobody should walk under it.

The repair itself is straightforward for a trained technician, and genuinely dangerous for anyone else. Before any spring is touched, the door has to be secured, the opener disconnected, and the remaining tension released in a controlled way using proper winding bars. Once the load is off, the springs are removed, the drums, cables, center bearing and end plates are inspected, and new springs of the correct wire size and cycle rating are fitted. We replace them as a pair, because the surviving spring has the same age and the same number of cycles and will typically follow within weeks. Tension is then set to the right number of turns, the door is balanced so it holds position at mid-travel, and the travel limits on the opener are reset. Homes near the coast in Hollywood and Hallandale Beach often have springs that have corroded as well as fatigued, which is one more reason we check the whole torsion assembly while it is open.