The Symptom
The call we get from Brookline almost always starts the same way
The door won't budge, or it slams down the last foot of travel instead of settling. Sometimes there's a loud bang from the garage first, usually when nobody's even using the door. That bang is a torsion spring letting go.
Most houses in Brookline were built right around 1991
Which puts a lot of original torsion springs at 30-plus years of use. A standard torsion spring is rated for somewhere around 10,000 cycles - roughly seven to ten years of normal use - and a spring that's never been replaced on a house this age has been running on borrowed time for a long while. When it finally breaks, it's not a surprise to us, even if it is to you.
The other thing we see on these doors
The opener has been straining against a weak spring for months before it fully breaks, which can chew up the drive gear or the capacitor. If your opener has been getting noisier or slower to lift the door over the past few weeks, that's often the spring losing tension before the final snap, not the opener failing on its own.
Why This Fails Locally
New Hampshire winters put real stress on spring steel, and the cold here isn't mild - we're in a severe cold climate band, which means wide swings between a warm garage afternoon and a well-below-freezing overnight. Steel contracts in the cold, and a spring that's already fatigued from three decades of cycles loses elasticity faster when it's cold-soaked every night for months.
A 1991-era house also tends to have the original torsion hardware mounted exactly as the builder spec'd it, sized for the door weight and headroom of that era. If a steel door was swapped for a heavier insulated one at some point - fairly common as owners update for New Hampshire winters - the original spring is now undersized for the job it's doing, which shortens its life even more. We see this combination a lot in towns built out in this same window, and it's worth checking the spring size against the door before just replacing it with an identical match.
Stocked Parts
We carry common torsion spring sizes on the truck for the door openings and spring diameters that match 1980s-through-90s suburban construction, since that's what we're driving into most days in this part of the state. For a standard double-car door spring swap, we can usually finish the job same visit without a special order.
Where we run into a lead time is uncommon spring wire diameters, odd-length doors, or hardware tied to a specific opener brand's proprietary bracket. If your door has been modified from the original - a different door installed on old track, for instance - we may need to order the exact match rather than force a close-enough size. We'd rather tell you that up front than hand you a spring that wears out again in two years.
The DIY Question
Torsion springs are under real tension
Enough to break bones or worse if the winding bars slip. We're not going to walk you through doing this yourself, and most of the DIY videos online skip the part where the spring is rated for a specific door weight and wound to a specific number of turns. Get that wrong and the door either won't lift evenly or the spring fails again fast.
What you can safely check yourself
Whether the bang you heard came from one spring or both (doors have one or two), whether the opener still runs but the door won't lift manually, and whether the door is noticeably heavier to lift by hand than it used to feel. That tells us a lot on the phone before we're even on the road from Londonderry.
What It Costs
We don't have a flat number to quote here without seeing the door - spring diameter, door weight, and whether one or both springs need replacing all change the job. What we can tell you is that replacing both springs together, even when only one has broken, is usually the better call on a door this age: the second one is running the same cycle count and the same cold exposure, and it's close behind.
We travel the 17 miles from Londonderry for Brookline calls, so factor that into scheduling rather than expecting a same-hour response. We'll give you a number before we start the work, not after.
