Antioch, CA
Broken torsion spring on your Antioch garage door? We explain what fails, what the repair involves, what it costs, and why this area's housing stock makes it common.
Symptoms
If the door won't lift past a foot off the floor, or it slams down instead of lowering slow and even, you're almost certainly looking at a broken torsion spring, not a motor problem.
The opener will usually still run - you'll hear the motor straining, maybe grinding - because the opener was never built to lift the full weight of the door on its own. That's the spring's job. A visible gap in the coil above the door, a loud bang from the garage right before the door got hard to move, or a door that feels fine going down but fights you going up are all the same story.
Sometimes it's one spring on a two-spring double door, and the door will lift unevenly, cocked to one side, scraping a track. Sometimes a cable has jumped its drum instead, which looks similar but isn't the same fix.
If the door is dead silent and won't move at all, check whether the opener is even getting power before you call anyone out - that's a different problem, and a cheaper one. A spring that's actually broken won't fix itself with a new remote battery, and running the opener repeatedly on a dead spring is how you burn out the motor on top of the spring.
The repair
A torsion spring job means releasing the wound tension safely, pulling the old spring off the shaft, and winding a replacement to the correct turns for that door's weight and track setup - this is not a bolt-swap, and it's the part that puts people in the ER when they try it with the door still loaded.
We check both springs even on a single-spring failure, because the other one is usually close behind on the same wear curve, along with the cables, since a frayed cable under spring tension is its own hazard. On most Antioch jobs we're carrying standard torsion spring sizes on the truck, since the housing stock here clusters tightly around a handful of common door weights and spring wind patterns from the 1960s-70s building wave.
Where we run short is the odd original hardware - a few older one-piece doors or oversized commercial-weight springs that aren't a stock size. Those can mean a day or two wait on a part, and we'll tell you straight if that's your door rather than guess.
Once the new spring's wound and set, we balance the door - it should hold position at waist height with the opener disconnected - lubricate the moving hardware, and run it through a full cycle before we leave.
Pricing
We don't post a flat number here because the job isn't flat: a single spring on a light steel door costs less than a matched pair on a heavy insulated double, and whether cables or rollers need replacing at the same time changes the invoice. What we can tell you is how we price it - parts plus labor, quoted before we touch the door, no charge added once the job starts.
Across this service area, median household income runs $139,567, and what we see most often is owners choosing to replace both springs as a pair rather than patch the one that broke, since the second spring is usually close to its own failure point and a second truck visit costs more than doing it once. That's a judgment call we'll walk through with you on-site, not something we decide for you.
The one place we won't save you money is on used or mismatched springs. A spring wound for the wrong door weight either won't lift the door right or will wear out again fast, and that's a callback nobody wants.
Local causes
A torsion spring is rated for a cycle count, not a calendar date, but calendar date tells you a lot in this area. Most of the garage doors we open up sit on homes built between 1950 and 2008, with the bulk of that stock going up during the 1960s and 70s construction wave - which means a large share of the original torsion hardware across the 24 communities we cover, from Brentwood five miles out to Norris Canyon at nineteen, is well past its rated wind count and has never been swapped.
Heat is part of the story everywhere, but less so here than people assume. This area sits in a moderate heat band, not the kind of desert swing that cooks spring coatings and rubber seals in a few summers. So when a spring goes in this part of the Bay Area, it's almost always straight mechanical fatigue from cycle count - years of daily openings on hardware installed before anyone was tracking spring life - rather than heat damage. With roughly 82,876 owner-occupied houses across this service area, a lot of those doors are original equipment nobody's touched since the springs were first wound at the factory decades ago. That's the pattern we see on repeat: not a defect, just time.
Questions
Disconnect the opener using the release cord and try lifting the door by hand. If it feels heavy, won't stay up on its own, or drops as soon as you let go, the spring is broken or badly weakened. A door that lifts easily by hand but the opener still won't move it points to the opener or the electronics instead.
You can, and on some jobs that's the right call. But if the door is original to a 1960s-70s era house, the other spring is usually close behind on the same wear curve, so most owners in this area choose to do both at once rather than pay for a second truck visit a few months later.
If the door is stuck down, don't force it open by hand or with the opener - a broken spring means the full weight of the door is unsupported, and the other spring or the cables can give way under that load. Leave it closed and call rather than risk the door coming down on someone.
Torsion springs fail on cycle count, not on a schedule you'd notice day to day. There's often a slow loss of lift in the weeks before, but it's easy to miss until the spring gives out fully - especially on original hardware from the 1960s-70s building wave that's never been inspected.
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Antioch Garage Door Pros repairs and installs garage doors, springs and openers in Antioch, CA and the surrounding area.
