One of the most common and hard working garage door parts is also one of the most widely overlooked parts of a garage door system. Often times, people do not think about garage door springs at all until one breaks . In this blog we will be discussing garage door springs, types of garage door springs and what they do.
What do garage door springs do?
Garage door springs counter balance the weight of garage doors so that they can be opened by hand or with a garage door opener.
Types of garage door springs
There are two basic types of garage door springs : extension springs, and torsion springs.
Extension springs – Extension springs are traditionally used on smaller, lighter doors. Typically, these smaller doors are between 8-9 feet wide.
Extension springs are easily identified in that they are mounted on the outside of the horizontal garage door track. These springs are considered to be the most dangerous of the two types of springs simply because they are exposed. This makes it much easier to get fingers caught in the coils or even into the cables. If these springs are not properly installed with safety cables, when the break, they can violently fly down hitting who or what is under the garage door.
Torsion Springs – These springs are confined and mounted to a tube which is located out of the way and above the garage door. Torsion springs are the safest of the two types of garage door springs and can be used on any door. Because of their more remote location, and due to the fact that they are mounted on a tube, there is less chance of being injured by them.
How can you tell that your garage door springs are weak and getting ready to break?
Usually when the garage door gets extremely heavy to lift by hand, that is a sign that the springs are not working well.
A good way to test your springs is to disconnect your garage door from the garage door opener. Then, grab the door by hand and lift it to waist high. You should be able to let it go, and the door should sit there in that position, or very slowly descend to the ground. It should never slam to the ground. If your door does quickly go back down, it is time to get your springs replaced.
What happens if you have a garage door opener and you use it to operate your door when you have bad or broken springs?
If you find that your garage door springs are going bad or have broken completely and you still use your door with your garage door opener it can cause severe damage to your opener. It can overload your opener causing it to strip out the main gears in your opener unit, and sometimes it can even burn up your garage door opener motor.When this goes long enough, your opener can quit altogether making it very difficult and even impossible to open your door.
If one of the springs break on a garage door is it okay to just replace the broken spring or do I have to replace both?
Garage door springs work evenly together in pairs, so they also wear evenly in pairs. If one garage door spring breaks, you can bet that the other isn’t too far behind. It is for this reason that Covenant Garage Doors recommends that you replace springs in pairs for safety reasons and so that you don’t have to go through the hassle of replacing them individually. Besides, when a technician replaces springs, he has to disassemble everything to put up the new spring, so it just makes more sense to have him do both while he has everything apart.
Can’t you just repair a broken spring rather than replace it entirely?
Some companies do offer to just repair a broken spring rather than swap it out for a new one, but this is actually really dangerous. Broken springs are due to metal fatigue, the metal gets weak and then it breaks. When a company ‘repairs’ your old spring rather than replacing it, they are taking your broken spring with it’s fatigued metal and reattaching the broken parts with a coupling. It is really easy for a repaired spring to simply break again.