What Is Going On
Steel loses flex as it gets cold. A torsion spring that's wound tight to lift a 150-plus pound door doesn't care that it worked fine in October - once temperatures drop hard, the metal gets brittle right at the point of an existing micro-fracture, and it lets go. You'll usually hear it: a bang from the garage, sometimes loud enough to bring you outside to check.
Most of the houses in and around Longmont went up between 1952 and 2010, with the bulk of that stock dating to the 1980s and 90s across the area's older neighborhoods. That matters here because a lot of those garages still have their original torsion hardware, or a first-generation replacement from whoever owned the house in the 90s. Thirty-plus-year-old springs weren't built for the duty cycles or the cold-snap swings this area sees, and they're well past the age where cold is the thing that finally finishes them off, not the thing that started the problem.
A spring going isn't usually a random failure. It's the last step in a process that's been running for years - cycle fatigue plus a hard freeze is what actually breaks it.
When It Stops Being a DIY Job
A broken torsion spring on a double door is not a job to open the garage and eyeball. The spring is under massive tension even when it's snapped, the door itself can weigh well over a hundred pounds once it's unsupported, and the winding bars and cones involved aren't something most homeowners keep in a toolbox. If the door is down and won't move, or it's halfway up and stuck, leave it there and don't force the opener.
Where it does make sense to call rather than wait: if you hear a bang and the door won't lift by hand, if one side of the door looks lower than the other (a sign only one spring on a two-spring setup has gone), or if the opener is straining and grinding trying to move a door it can no longer lift on its own. That last one burns out openers fast, and on a house with original 1980s-90s hardware, that opener is often original too.
Doing Nothing For Now
If your spring hasn't gone yet but you're hearing more strain from the opener, or noticing the door feels heavier by hand than it used to, that's worth paying attention to before a cold night makes the decision for you. We won't tell you every older spring needs replacing today - plenty of original hardware in this area's 1980s-90s stock is still fine, and we're not going to sell you a job you don't need.
What we will say plainly: we don't recommend re-tensioning or patching a spring that's already partially failed. Once one strand or coil has gone, the rest is on borrowed time, and the parts cost for a full spring set is small next to the cost of a door coming down on something. If you're not sure which category your setup is in, that's a five-minute look, not a guessing game.
