The bang before dawn: what a snapped spring is.

First, the safety part

• Don't lift the door by hand. The spring was doing almost all of that work. Without it, a double sectional door is genuinely heavy, and a door that gets partway up on adrenaline can come back down the same way.
• Leave the manual release alone while the car's under the door. The red cord disconnects the door from the opener. With a healthy spring that's how you open a door in a blackout; with a snapped spring it hands you the full dead weight.
• Don't run the opener at it. Most openers will refuse or stall, but forcing repeated attempts strains the motor and can bend the top panel.
• If the car's trapped and the morning matters, say both in the enquiry. "Car's behind the door, on at seven" is exactly the information the call back needs.

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What actually happened

Above your door there's a steel shaft with one or two tightly wound torsion springs on it. Their job is counterbalance: the spring unwinds as the door opens and winds back up as it closes, storing and releasing the door's weight so a 60-plus kilogram door feels like a few kilos at the handle. Every open and close is one cycle of wind and unwind, and spring steel is honest about arithmetic: it fatigues by cycles, not by calendar.

Residential torsion springs are commonly rated around ten thousand cycles. A household that opens the door three or four times a day gets to that number in roughly seven to ten years. When the fatigue point arrives, the spring lets go in one clean break, and the energy release is the bang that woke the street's lightest sleeper. That's also why it so often happens at the first lift of a cold morning: the highest-load moment of the day landing on the most tired steel.

Why you can't just "get the spring off eBay"

Torsion springs are sized to the door: its weight, height, track set-up and drum size decide the wire gauge, coil diameter and length. The wrong spring leaves a door under- or over-balanced, which strains the opener and wears the new spring fast. And the winding itself is done with the spring under significant stored tension, with proper winding bars. It's the one garage door job with a genuinely bad DIY safety record, which is why the honest advice everywhere, including here, is: technician's job.

What the repair involves

• Confirming the fault and the spec. Weighing up the door, measuring the broken spring and its mate, checking cables, drums and bearings while everything's apart.
• One spring or both. On a two-spring door where one has died of fatigue, the other has the same mileage. Replacing both in one visit is usually the honest economics; you'll get that maths straight, not as a scare.
• Rebalance and test. New springs wound to the door's actual weight, the door run by hand and by opener, and the opener's force settings checked so it isn't masking a bad balance.

Cost-wise this site publishes no prices, on purpose. The model in words: a call-out, then the repair priced on the driveway once the fault's confirmed, agreed before work starts. A spring quoted sight-unseen is a guess about your door's size and what else the bang took with it.

When a snapped spring means a bigger conversation

On a sound, reasonably modern door, a snapped spring is a repair, full stop. On a door that's already tired, the spring can be the messenger: panels drummy with rust, tracks worn oval, an opener from two owners ago. If that's the picture, the on-site conversation shifts from "fix the spring" to "here's what fixing versus replacing honestly looks like", and the repair-or-replace guide walks that decision before anyone's standing in your driveway.

"It went bang and now it won't lift" is a perfectly good technical description. Send exactly that.

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