Waxahachie, TX
Broken torsion spring on a house built between 1976 and 2014? We work on the spring stock common across Waxahachie and the surrounding service area, seven days a week.
Warning signs
The door won't lift, or it lifts a few inches and stops. Maybe you heard a bang from the garage earlier in the day, loud enough that you went out to check and found the door sitting crooked in the opening.
That bang is a torsion spring letting go. Sometimes it's quieter than that: the opener strains, the motor gets hot, and the door only moves with someone pushing from underneath while the opener whines. On a two-spring setup, one spring can snap and the door will still look almost normal at rest, just heavy.
You try the opener, it labors, and you assume the opener is dying. Nine times out of ten it isn't the opener. It's the spring that's no longer carrying its half of the door's weight, and the motor is trying to do a job it was never built to do alone.
If your door is a double-wide and one spring is gone, do not run the opener repeatedly hoping it fixes itself. That just stresses the second spring, the cables, and the opener's gears further. Cut power to the opener at the wall switch if you can, and call before anyone touches it.
Local causes
Most of the housing across this service area went up between 1976 and 2014, with the median build year around 1996, and that matters for springs. A torsion spring is rated by cycle count and by the weight of the specific door it was wound for. Doors and springs installed on 1980s and 90s builds across the thirteen communities we cover are now well past a normal spring's working life, even on a door that's never been repainted or replaced.
Heat is the other half of it. This area sits in a moderate heat climate band, and garage temperatures swing hard through the year. Steel spring wire expands and contracts with those swings, and the coating on older, unpainted torsion springs breaks down faster under repeated heat cycling than it would somewhere cooler. Add a garage that sees direct summer sun on the door most of the day, and you're asking 25- and 30-year-old wire to keep flexing exactly the way it did when it was new.
This isn't a design flaw in any one house. It's what happens to a mechanical part with a fixed cycle life, installed on a schedule of doors going up steadily across three decades, none of them due for a spring at the same time but a lot of them due right around now.
Booking
Call and tell us the door won't lift, whether you heard a bang, and whether it's a single door or a double. That's enough for us to bring the right spring size on the truck instead of guessing.
If you know the door brand or can read any numbers off the spring itself, that helps, but most homeowners can't get close enough to a broken spring to read anything, and that's fine.
We serve homeowners across Waxahachie and the surrounding towns in this area, including Oak Leaf, Midlothian, Ovilla, Glenn Heights, Palmer, Maypearl, Ennis, Ferris, Italy, Venus, Wilmer, Hutchins, and Alma. Spring failure doesn't wait for a convenient afternoon, so if the door is stuck open or stuck shut, say so when you call and we'll treat it that way.
One honest limit: if your springs are an oddball size we don't carry on the truck, or the door itself is damaged beyond the spring, we may need to order a part before we can finish the job in one visit. We'll tell you that on-site before doing any work, not after.
The repair
We match the new spring to your door's actual weight and the drum size on your shaft, not just whatever was on there before, since a spring installed slightly wrong for the door wears out early no matter how new it is.
On a double door we replace both springs together even if only one broke, because the survivor is now the same age and the same number of cycles as the one that just failed. We check the cables, the drums, and the bearing plates while we're in there, since a spring failure sometimes takes a cable partway with it or leaves a drum scored.
Median household income across this service area runs near $79,739, and most homeowners we talk to want the job done right the first time rather than paying twice, so we'd rather flag a worn cable now than have you call again in six months.
Once the new spring is set and balanced, we run the door through a full cycle by hand before handing it back to the opener, checking that it holds position at any height without help. That balance check is the difference between a spring that lasts and one that's fighting the opener from day one.
Questions
Torsion springs fail on cycle count and metal fatigue, not a single event, so there's rarely a warning beyond gradual stiffness or noise you might not have noticed. With a lot of the housing stock in this area dating to the 1980s and 90s, plenty of original springs are simply reaching the end of their working life around the same time.
You can, but we don't recommend it. If one spring failed from age and cycles, the other is on the same clock and close behind it. Replacing both now means one visit and matched wear going forward, instead of a second breakdown and a second call in a few months.
With the opener disconnected, yes, briefly, but a door with a broken spring is unbalanced and heavy. Don't force it past where it wants to stop, and keep hands clear of the spring and cables. If it won't move at all, leave it and wait for us.
Yes. We cover the surrounding service area as well, including Oak Leaf, Midlothian, Ovilla, Glenn Heights, Palmer, Maypearl, Ennis, Ferris, Italy, Venus, Wilmer, Hutchins, and Alma.
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Waxahachie Garage Door Pros repairs and installs garage doors, springs and openers in Waxahachie, TX and the surrounding area.
