A garage door spring is the kind of item you probably do not spend too much time thinking about. However, when it breaks, it can leave you with a garage door you can’t open and a car you can’t access until you get it fixed. While it may be tempting to save a few bucks by fixing it yourself, it’s important to weigh the pros and cons of attempting a task that might be better off in the hands of a professional.
How Much Does It Cost to Fix a Garage Door Spring?
If your garage door spring breaks, you can either replace it yourself or hire an experienced professional. It you want to make it a DIY project, it will run you anywhere from $30 to $100 in parts. A professional, on the other hand, will charge anywhere from $200 to $300 to replace a broken spring. Although it may save you some money to tackle this project on your own, an experienced garage door professional can help you avoid the kinds of injuries that can occur with less experienced DIYers.
How Does a Garage Door Spring Work?
Garage door springs work by counterbalancing the weight of a garage door, which makes it open and close much more easily whether it’s opened manually or by an automatic garage door opener. Located above the opening of the garage door, the cables will cause the spring to wind up to move the garage door down, for example. Similarly, when you open the garage door, the springs will unwind to enable the cables to lift a heavy door open.
Unfortunately, all of this winding and unwinding weakens the springs after months and years of use. In fact, garage door springs are often listed according to their shelf life. For instance, they may be described as “10,000-use” or “20,000-use” springs. While it may seem like it will take forever to hit that number, a garage door may open as much as four or five times a day throughout the year.
Is It Dangerous to Replace a Garage Door Spring?
Although there is lots of information on the internet to help aspiring DIYers with home maintenance projects, this kind of task can be difficult for someone without experience.
Replacing broken garage door springs can be extremely dangerous because of the huge amount of tension these springs hold. One of the reasons there are so many injuries from replacing garage door springs is due to how older garage doors were made.
While new garage doors are constructed with safety cables to ensure that the spring stays in place if it breaks, older doors have no such mechanism. As a result, a spring from an older door can snap under tension and wind up going through walls into the next room or scratching a car or even ricocheting back into someone’s face.
Prioritize Safety Over Savings
Garage door springs might last anywhere from five to seven years with average door usage, so you won’t have to worry about replacing them very often. Nevertheless, when a spring snaps, it helps to call a professional garage door technician who has both the tools and the knowledge to do the job without injuring anyone or damaging personal property.
