What You Pay
We're not going to quote a number here that doesn't match your door. Torsion spring jobs vary by spring size, whether you've got one door or two, and whether the drums or cables need attention while we're in there. What we can tell you is what drives the range: door width, spring wire gauge, and how long the springs sat unbalanced before you called. A single 7-foot door usually runs less than a wide double door with two springs. If you want a real number, we look at the door, not guess over the phone. Homes across this service area - median household income here runs $87,623 - tend to have doors that were installed as part of the original build or a single replacement decades back, which affects what parts are on hand versus what has to be ordered. That's the honest limitation: if your spring size is discontinued, we may need a day or two to get the right one in rather than force a substitute that throws off the balance.
Where This Job Goes Sideways
The failure that turns a spring repair into a bigger bill is winding the wrong spring for the door weight. A lot of houses in this area were built between 1958 and 2010, with most of the stock going up in the 1980s and 90s, and that spread means we run into three or four different hardware generations in a single week - different drum sizes, different cable routing, different spring mounting brackets. Grab a generic spring off a shelf without matching the door's actual weight and wind, and you get a door that slams down or won't stay open, sometimes within days. The other spot this goes wrong is the bottom bracket. On older torsion setups, the bracket holding the cable under spring tension corrodes or loosens over the years, and if nobody checks it during the spring swap, it can let go later under full tension. We check it every time, but it's worth knowing why that step matters here specifically and isn't just a box to tick.
The Symptom
You know it's the spring, not the opener, when the door feels heavy the second you try to lift it by hand, or when it drops fast the last foot instead of settling. A snapped torsion spring often makes a bang loud enough to hear from inside the house - some owners think something fell in the garage. If one spring goes and the other is close behind in age, the door may open crooked, dropping lower on one side than the other, because one spring is still under tension and the other isn't. Don't try to force the opener through it; running the motor against a broken spring strains the gears and the drive belt or chain, turning a spring repair into an opener repair too. If your door is off track or the panels are bent from someone trying to force it open, that's a different job than a spring swap, and we'll tell you that straight rather than sell a fix that won't hold.
