At 6:40 last Wednesday morning something in the garage went off like a steel plate dropped on concrete. I was in the kitchen pouring coffee. It was 12 degrees outside, Tessa had just walked out to start the Civic, and for one bad second I thought the car had done something. Then the side door of the house opened and Tessa came back in, still holding her keys. "The garage just shot at me," she said.
What happened, and the one thing I did wrong
Our detached garage has a steel overhead door from 2006 with two torsion springs on a bar above the opening. When I went out in my coat and pajama pants, it was obvious which one had let go: one spring had a two-inch gap in the middle of the coil. The door was still closed. Tessa had pressed the remote, heard the bang, and the opener had lifted the door a few inches, groaned and stopped.
Here's my mistake. I pressed the wall button once more "to see." The opener strained, the door came up crooked, about a foot on one side, and I let go of the button and pressed it again to bring it back down. I've since learned that's exactly what you shouldn't do. The opener isn't built to lift the full weight of the door. The springs do that. Without one, you're asking a small motor and a set of cables to do a job they were never meant to do, and you can wreck the opener or jump a cable off its drum. We got lucky.
The Civic was stuck inside, so Tessa took the Tacoma to her office in Cascade. I messaged my manager, set up my laptop at the kitchen table and called the garage door company Gary has used twice, right when they opened at 7:30. They had a tech free at 1.
Why I didn't touch it
I watched exactly one video about replacing torsion springs that morning, and that was enough. A torsion spring holds enough energy to lift a door that weighs more than I do. Replacing one means unwinding the old spring and winding the new one with steel bars a quarter turn at a time, while the spring is loaded and trying to spin those bars out of your hands. The people who do it every day have the right bars, the right spring sizes on the truck and a feel for it. I have none of those.
When Gary walked over to look, he didn't even suggest it. Gary is a retired millwright who spent forty years around industrial machinery, and his whole comment was, "That's stored energy. I don't mess with stored energy I didn't put there." When a man who owns more tools than the hardware store says no, I say no too.
It's also just on my list of jobs I hire out, along with gas lines, anything inside the panel and the main roof. Most of the time my test is money. With this one, the cost of being wrong isn't measured in dollars.
What the pro did and charged
The tech was there about an hour. Total: $285. For that he:
- Replaced both springs, not just the broken one. They were the same age with the same number of cycles, and he said the second one usually follows within a year or so.
- Checked the lift cables and drums. Both were fine, which after my button-pushing I was relieved to hear.
- Lubricated the new springs, the hinges and the rollers.
- Balanced the door so it stays put when you lift it halfway by hand and let go.
- Tested the opener's auto-reverse with a board under the door.
He said cold snaps are their busiest days. A spring sits under full tension all night with the door closed, the steel is cold, and the first lift of the morning is when the tired ones break. He'd done three that morning before us.
Moose barked at him through the kitchen window for the entire hour, which the tech took better than I would have.
The money came out of our house fund, plus $35 from savings. It was the first repair since the water heater wiped the fund out in November. Starting December 1st we're putting in $250 a month instead of $150, so at least it's refilling faster now. The timing could have been worse. It could also have been better.
The Civic got out at 2:15. At dinner Tessa asked whether the other 2006 parts in that garage were going to start going off too. I didn't have a good answer, so I added the opener to the appliance-age list in the house sheet and changed the subject.
