Hollywood, FL · Garage Door Service
Torsion and extension spring repair for Hollywood, FL homes built between 1953 and 2005. Same-system knowledge, no guesswork on what's on your wall.
If the door won't budge, or it slams down the last foot of track, or the opener strains and reverses itself, you're almost certainly looking at a broken or failing spring, not a bad opener. On a torsion setup the spring sits on a shaft above the door and snaps with a loud bang, often when you're not even in the garage. On the older extension-spring setups still common on houses built before the mid-1970s, the spring runs along the horizontal track and tends to stretch and sag rather than snap clean, so the door creeps down unevenly on one side before it fails outright.
Housing across this service area went up mostly between 1953 and 2005, with the bulk of the stock dating to the 1960s and 70s across the 40-odd named areas we cover. That means a real mix of hardware generations on the wall right now - torsion springs added later as extension setups got retrofitted, and original single-spring torsion bars on doors that have never been touched since the house was built. We look at what's actually on the shaft before we quote anything, because the fix for a 1968 extension setup and a 2001 torsion setup aren't the same job.
A sagging door, one that looks slightly crooked in the opening, or cables that look loose but not snapped are all early warning signs worth a call before the spring lets go completely.
Spring repair cost comes down to a few things we can tell you honestly without a number in front of us: whether it's one spring or a matched pair, torsion or extension, standard residential wind or a heavier commercial-grade coil, and whether the cable and drums took damage when the spring went. A single door usually runs one torsion spring; a double door almost always runs two, and we replace both even if only one broke, since the second is on borrowed time and running it alone wears the opener unevenly.
We don't publish a flat number because the honest answer depends on what's actually on your door, and quoting a price before we've seen the hardware is how a company ends up upselling you on the truck. What we can tell you is that spring replacement is a bounded job with a known part cost and a known labor time - it's not a repair that spirals the way a bent track or a cracked panel can.
One limitation worth knowing up front: if your spring failed because a cable frayed or a drum cracked, that's a separate part, and we'll say so rather than bury it in the spring line. We'd rather tell you the second part upfront than surprise you at the door.
Springs fail from cycle count and from corrosion, and this area gives you both. The mild, humid coastal climate here doesn't put houses through freeze-thaw stress, but it does mean steady moisture in the air year-round, and galvanized spring coils that sit in a garage without climate control slowly lose their coating integrity faster than the same part would in a dry inland climate. That shows up as rust pitting on the coil, which weakens the wire long before the rated cycle count is used up.
Add to that the age of the housing stock - median build year 1973, with plenty of homes from the 1953-2005 range - and you've got a lot of original or first-replacement springs that are decades past due. A torsion spring rated for 10,000 cycles doesn't care what year it is; it cares how many times the door has gone up and down, and a spring installed when a house was built in the 60s or 70s has had fifty-plus years to get there, corrosion or not.
We see this pattern across the whole area we cover, not just one street - it's a housing-age and climate combination, not a one-off.
A spring job itself doesn't take long once we're on site - it's a bounded repair, not an open-ended one, and most doors are back in full working order the same visit. The bigger variable is what else the failure took with it. If the cable frayed and jumped the drum, or if the door came down hard enough to knock a roller out of the track, that adds time on top of the spring swap.
We won't run a door on a mismatched or undersized spring just to get you moving faster - a spring that's the wrong wind or wire gauge for your door's weight will fail again, usually sooner and sometimes more violently, since it's now under load it wasn't built for. If we don't have the exact spring on the truck for an unusual door, we'll say so rather than force a substitute.
Until it's fixed, treat the door as a two-person lift if you must open it by hand, and don't run the opener on a door with a broken spring - that's how openers burn out gears trying to lift dead weight.
If the opener motor runs but the door barely moves, or moves and then reverses, the spring is doing none of the lifting work it should. Look at the spring itself - a torsion spring visibly separated on the shaft, or an extension spring stretched and hanging loose, confirms it. An opener problem usually comes with grinding or clicking sounds and no door movement at all.
You can, but we don't recommend it. Both springs on a double door go on at the same time and wear at close to the same rate. Replacing one leaves the other near failure, and a mismatched pair puts uneven load on the opener and the shaft. Most jobs here replace both.
This area's mild, humid coastal air keeps moisture on galvanized coils year-round, even without freeze-thaw cycling. Pitting from corrosion weakens the wire faster than the rated cycle count would suggest, especially on springs original to houses built in the 1960s and 70s.
Only with two people, and carefully. A door with a broken spring has no counterbalance, so it's full dead weight on whoever lifts it. Don't run the opener in the meantime - it will strain trying to lift weight the spring should be carrying and can burn out the gears.
By Neighborhood
We also handle spring repair in these Hollywood-area suburbs.
Call now or request a free quote - same-day service on most repairs, upfront written pricing.
