You might also have an old, one piece door that swings outward as it goes up and overhead. This particular design will have springs mounted on the sides of the door opening - at about your waist height, secured to a lever bracket system that extends the springs toward the ceiling at the door closing. It is an old and extremely dangerous system, not manufactured anymore. If you have a such system in the garage, We highly recommend replacement.

The spring will usually break while under the maximum stress which is when the overhead garage door closes / travels down, or it is already completely closed (USUALLY). If you’re closing it manually and it happens during this operation, don’t try to prevent it from crushing down, let it go … well, unless your foot is where the door will slam!

When one of the two garage door springs breaks you need to have them both replaced at the same time! It will cost some extra money, but having an old and new spring installed will:
- put much more stress on the new one
- the door will loose proper balance
- the remaining old spring will most likely break soon

Torsion springs for residential overhead garage doors have anywhere between 5000 - 30000 cycles life span. Those digits represent an average total number o times you should be able to open and close your door before anticipating garage door spring replacement.

A critical issue with those springs is to have a safety cable installed inside of each single spring and secured properly, so when the door opens and closes, the spring can freely slide on this cable! When the garage door spring snaps without the cable inside, broken ends might severely injure anyone standing within their range. The cables should be always included with the overhead garage doors hardware (assuming that they came equipped with extension springs), but A LOT OF PEOPLE either forget to install them, or don’t read instructions and maybe assume that they are not required.