What You Are Seeing
The door won't budge, or it only lifts a few inches before stalling. Sometimes you hear a bang from the garage before any of that starts - that's usually the spring letting go.
Split torsion spring visuals
Look up above the door: if it's a torsion setup, you'll see the spring sitting slack or split clean in two on the shaft. If the door has two springs, one can fail while the other still holds tension, which is why some owners get the door halfway open and think it's an opener problem instead.
Cable damage alongside springs
A cable that's jumped the drum or frayed near the bottom bracket often shows up at the same time, since a broken spring lets the door drop hard and puts sudden load on the cables.
Don't force the opener
None of this is a problem you fix by pulling harder on the emergency release or adjusting the opener's force settings - the opener was never built to lift a door against a dead spring, and running it that way strips the gears fast. If the door is heavy to lift by hand with the opener disconnected, the spring is the reason, not the track or the rollers.
Why This Fails Locally
Housing across The Woodlands and its villages mostly went up between 1971 and 2012, with the bulk of it dating to the 1980s and 90s. A lot of those garages still have their original torsion springs, or a first replacement set installed decades ago - either way, steel that's done its rated number of open-close cycles and then some. Springs don't fail from one bad day, they fail from years of winding and unwinding, and a house built in 1988 has had a long time to rack up cycles. The Woodlands sits in a moderate-heat climate band rather than one with hard freezes, so the failure pattern here looks different than it does further north - you're less likely to get a spring that snaps from a sudden cold snap and more likely to get one that's simply fatigued out from steady use in warm weather. Across the roughly 8,242 owner-occupied houses in the service area, most of that stock falls in the same construction window, which is why spring calls cluster by age of the house more than by any one street or subdivision. A 1990s-built double garage with its original springs is a near-certain candidate before a 2005-built one with a later spring swap.
What the Fix Involves
A torsion spring job starts with unwinding the old spring safely under tension - this is the part that hurts people who try it without the right bars, so it's not a weekend project.
Checking shaft and bearings
Once the spring's off, we check the shaft, bearing plates, drums, and cables, because a spring that failed from age often takes a worn bearing or a frayed cable with it, and replacing just the spring while ignoring a bad cable means a second call soon after.
Spring sizing and winding
We size the new spring to the door's weight and the drum size on your shaft, wind it to the correct number of turns, and test the balance by hand with the opener disconnected - a properly balanced door should hold still at waist height on its own.
Paired spring replacement
On doors with two springs, we replace both as a pair even if only one broke, since the surviving spring is usually close behind on cycle life and a mismatched pair throws off balance and strains the opener. We carry common torsion spring sizes for the standard residential doors found on most houses in this area, though a few older or unusual sizes aren't stock items and may need a day or two to get in.
What Can Go Wrong
Winding a torsion spring to the wrong number of turns leaves a door that's either too heavy for the opener or one that slams down - both wear things out faster and the second one is a real safety risk.
Reusing old parts
Reusing old cables or bearing plates to save a few dollars is a false economy; they're usually the next thing to fail and you end up paying for a second service call. Extension spring setups, less common here but still around on older garages, have their own failure mode - a broken extension spring with no safety cable running through it can let the spring itself become a projectile, which is why we always check for and add containment cables if they're missing.
Specialty spring sizes
One honest limitation: if a specialty spring size isn't something we stock, you may be looking at a short wait rather than a same-day fix, and we'd rather tell you that up front than promise a turnaround we can't hit.
Door nearing end of life
And if the drums, shaft, or track show enough wear alongside the broken spring, replacing just the spring isn't always the right call - sometimes the more honest answer is that the door itself is closer to the end of its life than the spring is.
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