Garage Door Torsion Spring Color Codes: How to Identify the Springs on Your Door

Introduction

Look up at the wall above your garage door and you will usually see one or two long steel springs wound around a shaft. Somewhere on those springs, if you look closely, there is a dab of colour: a painted cone at the end, or a stripe along the coils. That colour is not decoration. It is part of an industry standard, and it tells a trained technician most of what they need to know to order the exact right replacement part for your door. Homeowners often photograph a broken spring, spot the colour, and assume they can now buy the matching part online. The reality is more useful and a little more complicated than that, and understanding it will save you money, wasted trips, and the very real risk of buying the wrong spring.

This guide explains what the colours on a garage door spring actually mean, how the coding differs between torsion and extension springs, how you can safely read your own springs from the floor without touching anything, and why the final identification and the replacement itself belong to a professional. It closes with realistic 2026 Ontario costs and a set of frequently asked questions. Every external link in this article has been verified to point to a live page on a recognized industry body. The single most important thing to take away is this: the colour narrows things down, but it never tells the whole story on its own, and the spring is under enough stored energy to seriously injure anyone who handles it without the right training and tools.

First, Which Kind of Spring Do You Have?

Before any colour makes sense, you need to know which of the two spring systems is on your door, because the colour means completely different things on each. Our torsion versus extension springs guide covers the full comparison, but here is the short version you can confirm in ten seconds from the floor.

Torsion springs sit on a horizontal steel shaft mounted on the wall directly above the door opening. They are the modern standard on virtually every new residential door installed in Canada. A single-car door usually has one spring; a double-car door usually has two, meeting at a centre bracket in the middle. When the door lifts, these springs twist and unwind, turning the shaft that winds the lift cables onto drums at each end.

Extension springs are the older style. They run horizontally along the tracks, one above each track on either side of the door, and they stretch and contract rather than twist. If you see long springs running back over the horizontal tracks parallel to the ceiling, you have extension springs, and you should also have a safety cable running through the middle of each one, as we explain in our extension spring safety cable guide.

Roughly speaking, if the spring is above the door on a shaft, it is torsion, and if it is off to the sides along the tracks, it is extension. Get this right first, because a torsion colour chart and an extension colour chart are not interchangeable.

Why Springs Are Colour-Coded At All

The colour system is not something any single manufacturer invented. It is a published industry standard maintained by the Door and Access Systems Manufacturers Association, or DASMA. Their Technical Data Sheet 171, the official colour codes for torsion and extension springs, is the master reference that spring makers follow. Because the standard is shared across the industry, a technician can walk up to almost any residential door in the country and read the springs the same way, regardless of who built the door.

The reason a standard exists is that springs that look nearly identical to the eye can be dramatically different in strength. Two torsion springs of the same length and the same coil diameter can be built from wire that differs by only a few thousandths of an inch, and that tiny difference completely changes how much weight the spring lifts. Paint is the fast, at-a-glance way to tell them apart without measuring every one with a caliper. It is quality control for the manufacturer and a shortcut for the installer.

One thing the DASMA document itself is careful to state, and we will echo it throughout this article: the colour chart is a tool for manufacturers and trained technicians, not an invitation for homeowners to replace their own springs. Reading the colour is safe. Acting on it by buying and installing a spring is not.

Torsion Spring Colours: Two Different Messages

A torsion spring actually carries two separate pieces of colour information, and confusing the two is the most common mistake homeowners make. One colour lives on the cones, and the other lives on the body of the spring.

The cone colour tells you wind direction

At each end of a torsion spring is a cast fitting called a cone. One end has the winding cone (where the technician inserts winding bars) and the other has the stationary cone (which bolts to the centre bracket). The colour painted on these cones tells you the direction the spring is wound, which determines which side of the door it belongs on.

By the DASMA convention, a spring with red cones is right-wound, and a right-wound spring is installed on the left-hand side of the door as you face it from inside the garage. A spring with black cones is left-wound, and it belongs on the right-hand side. On a two-spring door you therefore normally have one red-coned and one black-coned spring, a mirrored pair. Getting the wind direction wrong is not a cosmetic error: a spring installed on the wrong side will not counterbalance the door correctly and can unwind itself loose.

The body colour tells you wire size

The other colour, usually painted as a stripe or a dab along the coils of the spring, identifies the wire diameter, which is the single biggest factor in how strong the spring is. Wire is measured in thousandths of an inch, and the differences are small enough that the eye cannot judge them, which is exactly why the colour exists. Here are the common residential wire sizes and their DASMA colours, drawn from the master chart:

There is a catch that the table above hides, and it matters. DASMA only has about ten colours to work with, but there are far more than ten wire sizes in use across all garage and commercial doors. So each colour repeats: yellow, for example, marks 0.207 inch wire on a residential door, but the same yellow marks a much heavier wire on an industrial spring. The colour alone cannot tell those apart. A technician resolves the ambiguity by combining the colour with the physical measurements, which is the part a homeowner cannot safely do. This is why identification is never colour alone.

The Four Numbers a Professional Actually Needs

Colour is a starting point, not a finish line. To order the correct torsion spring, a technician records four measurements, and only one of them is the colour:

1. Wire size. The diameter of the wire the spring is made from, confirmed with a caliper by measuring across a set number of coils, not guessed from the paint alone.
2. Inside diameter. The diameter of the hollow centre of the spring, commonly 1 and 3/4 inch or 2 inch on residential doors. This is often stamped on the stationary cone.
3. Overall length. The relaxed length of the spring measured along the coils, not counting the cones. A longer spring stores more energy.
4. Wind direction. Left-wound or right-wound, read from the cone colour and confirmed by the angle of the coil ends.

Change any one of those four and you have a different spring with a different lifting capacity. Two springs can share the same colour stripe and still be wrong for each other because their length or inside diameter differs. This is the core reason that a photo of a colour, on its own, is not enough to order a part, and why reputable shops measure the door and the spring rather than relying on a customer's phone picture. It is also why the springs on your door were sized to your specific door weight in the first place, a topic we cover in our garage door weight guide.

Extension Spring Colours: A Simpler, Different Code

If you have the older extension-spring setup, the colour code is simpler but means something entirely different. On an extension spring, the single colour does not indicate wire size or wind direction. It indicates the amount of door weight the pair of springs is rated to lift. The colours run through a ten-step scale, and because there are more weight ratings than colours, the scale repeats for very light and very heavy doors, just as the torsion wire colours do. A representative slice of the DASMA extension chart looks like this:

Because extension springs are always installed and replaced as a matched pair, the rating is expressed per pair. Mixing a spring from one colour with a spring from another leaves the door lopsided and puts uneven load on the tracks and rollers. If your door still runs on extension springs, this is also a good moment to think about whether a conversion to a torsion system makes sense, which we walk through in our torsion conversion guide.

How to Read Your Springs Safely From the Floor

You can gather useful identification information yourself, safely, as long as you follow one rule without exception: look, do not touch. A wound torsion spring stores a large amount of energy whenever the door is closed, and even a broken spring can still have surprises in it. You never need to put a hand, a tool, or a tape measure near a mounted spring to read its colour. Here is the safe routine:

1. Open the door fully and leave the opener engaged. With the door up, a torsion spring is at its most relaxed, and you can see the cones and coils clearly from below.
2. Photograph the whole spring assembly from the floor. Stand back, zoom in with your phone, and capture the full length of the spring, both cones, and the centre bracket. A clear photo is more useful to a technician than any measurement you might attempt.
3. Note the cone colour at the ends. Red or black tells the wind direction. On a two-spring door, note which colour is on which side.
4. Note any colour stripe on the coils. This is the wire-size marking. Photograph it in good light, since faded paint can be hard to name from memory.
5. Count the springs and note whether one or both look broken. A broken torsion spring shows a clear gap where the coil has separated. If one of a pair has broken, plan to replace both, for reasons we cover below.

What you must never do: do not stand on a ladder to reach the spring, do not touch or spin the winding cone, do not loosen any setscrew, and do not try to wrap a tape measure around a mounted spring. The measuring belongs to the technician who arrives with locking pliers, proper winding bars, and the training to unload the spring first. DASMA's garage door safety tips are unambiguous that spring work is for trained technicians only, and we say the same throughout our guide to avoiding repair scams: a good company will happily explain what your springs are before quoting.

Why Identification Ends With a Professional

It is worth being blunt about why the last step of identification, and every step of replacement, belongs to a trained technician rather than a motivated homeowner with a colour chart.

First, the colour is ambiguous by design. As noted, the ten-colour scale repeats, so a colour narrows the wire size to a short list but does not pin it. Only a caliper measurement across the coils, combined with the inside diameter and the length, resolves it. Getting close enough to a mounted spring to measure it safely means unloading it first.

Second, an incorrectly sized spring is not merely inconvenient, it is unsafe. A spring that is too weak leaves the door heavy and overworks the opener; a spring that is too strong makes the door fly up and can slam it at the top or leave it hanging open. Either way the door is no longer balanced, which stresses the cables, the shaft bearings, and the opener. Our balance test guide shows how a correctly sprung door should behave, and how to spot one that is not.

Third, the physical act of changing a torsion spring is one of the genuinely dangerous jobs on a house. The springs are wound under a couple of hundred pounds of stored torque, and a slipped winding bar at full wind moves fast enough to break bones or worse. This is not a job where being careful is enough; it requires the right tools and repeatable technique. The International Door Association, the industry's professional body, maintains a directory of qualified installers at doors.org for exactly this reason.

Single Spring or Two? And Why Pairs Get Replaced Together

Homeowners often ask why a technician recommends replacing both springs when only one has broken. The logic is straightforward. On a two-spring door, both springs have been through the same number of open-and-close cycles and have aged under the same conditions. When one reaches the end of its fatigue life and snaps, the other is usually not far behind. Replacing only the broken one means paying a second service call within months when its twin fails, and running an unbalanced door in the meantime while the new spring and the old spring pull with different force.

There is also a cycle-life dimension. Standard residential torsion springs are commonly rated for about 10,000 open-and-close cycles, which works out to roughly seven to twelve years for an average household. High-cycle springs, built from different wire, can be rated for 20,000 cycles or more. If your springs are failing sooner than you expected, our spring cycle life guide explains what realistic lifespans look like and when a high-cycle upgrade earns back its modest premium. When a technician replaces a pair, it is also the natural moment to inspect the cables and drums, since the shaft is already being worked on, a point we expand in our garage door cable failure guide.

Realistic 2026 Costs in Southern Ontario

Prices on this page are before HST.

Spring replacement is one of the more common garage door repairs, and it is priced as an all-in job that includes the parts, the labour, the service call, and a balance check afterward. Realistic 2026 numbers for the London area look like this:

• Single torsion spring on a single-car door: typically $229 to $320 all-in.
• A pair of torsion springs on a single-car door: typically $260 to $400 all-in.
• A pair of torsion springs on a double-car door: typically $300 to $550 all-in.
• A high-cycle pair on a double-car door: typically $420 to $620 all-in, reflecting the more expensive wire.
• Extension springs replaced as a pair: typically $200 to $400 all-in.
• A spring re-tension and re-balance with no new parts: typically $90 to $220.
• Service call: a flat $85, absorbed into the price of the repair when work is done.

Two notes on these figures. First, the reason a single $40 spring turns into a few hundred dollars installed is that most of the price is the trained labour, the service vehicle, and the after-job balance and safety check, all of which are real value on a part that can hurt you. Second, buying the exact part yourself online to save money usually backfires: if the colour or size is even slightly wrong, you have paid for a spring you cannot use, and most shops will not install a customer-supplied spring because they cannot warranty a part they did not source. For a fuller breakdown of what drives the number, see our spring replacement cost guide.

When the Colour Code Does Not Help

The colour system is reliable, but it is not universal, and there are a few situations where it will not give you a clean answer:

• Faded or painted-over springs. A spring that has spent fifteen years in a damp garage can lose its paint to rust, or a previous owner may have painted the whole assembly to match a wall. In that case there is no colour to read and the technician goes straight to measurement.
• Non-standard or imported hardware. Some older or off-brand doors used springs that did not follow the DASMA scheme. The colour on those may mean nothing, or may follow a maker's private code.
• The two colours get confused. Homeowners sometimes read the red cone as the wire-size colour and conclude they need a red-striped spring. The cone colour is wind direction; the coil stripe is wire size. They are two separate messages, and mixing them up leads to ordering the wrong part.
• Oil-tempered versus galvanized wire. Two springs can share a colour and a size but be made from different steel with different rust and fatigue behaviour. The colour does not capture this; the technician's part selection does.

In every one of these cases the fix is the same: the colour is one input, and a trained technician confirms the rest by measuring and inspecting. That is not a failure of the colour system, it is simply its correct place in the process.

How This Fits the Rest of Your Door

The springs are the heart of the counterbalance system, but they work as part of a set that includes the cables, the drums, the shaft bearings, the rollers, and the tracks. When you understand what your springs are, you also understand a lot about how the whole door behaves. A door that has always felt heavy may have been under-sprung from the day it was installed; a door that has started slamming or flying up has likely lost a spring or drifted out of balance. Keeping the springs lightly lubricated, as described in our lubrication guide, and running the quick monthly balance check, extends their life and gives you early warning before a break leaves you with a car trapped in the garage.

Knowing your spring colours will not let you safely replace them, and it is not meant to. What it does is turn you into an informed customer. When a technician tells you your double door needs a red-and-black high-cycle pair in a two-inch inside diameter, you will know exactly what those words mean, you will be able to tell a fair quote from an inflated one, and you will understand why the number is what it is. That is the real value of reading the colour on your springs.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does the colour on my garage door spring mean?

It depends on the spring type. On a torsion spring, the cone colour at the ends indicates wind direction (red is right-wound, black is left-wound) and a separate colour on the coils indicates the wire size. On an extension spring, the single colour indicates how much door weight the pair is rated to lift. The colours follow the DASMA industry standard.

Can I just order a spring that matches the colour I see?

No. The colour narrows the choice but does not pin it, because the ten-colour scale repeats across many wire sizes and weight ratings. Ordering by colour alone risks buying a spring that matches the paint but not the length, inside diameter, or wind direction, and therefore does not balance your door. A technician confirms the exact part by measuring.

Why is a red cone on the left side of my door?

Because a red-coned spring is right-wound, and by convention a right-wound spring is installed on the left side of the door as you face it from inside the garage. A black-coned, left-wound spring goes on the right. On a two-spring door you normally have one of each, mirrored across the centre bracket.

Do both springs need to be the same colour?

On a two-spring torsion door the two springs share the same wire-size colour but have opposite cone colours, one red and one black, because they are wound in opposite directions. On an extension-spring door both springs must share the same weight-rating colour so the door lifts evenly. Mixing weight ratings on an extension door leaves it lopsided.

Is it safe to measure my own springs?

You can safely read and photograph the colours from the floor with the door open. You should not measure a mounted spring, because doing so means getting your hands close to a component that stores enough energy to cause serious injury. Leave the caliper measurement of wire size, inside diameter, and length to the technician, who unloads the spring first.

How long should my springs last before the colour matters again?

A standard residential torsion spring is commonly rated for about 10,000 cycles, roughly seven to twelve years for an average household that opens the door a few times a day. High-cycle springs can last two to three times as long. When one breaks, you will be reading colours again, and it is worth replacing the pair together so the next break is not right around the corner.

My spring has no visible colour at all. What now?

Paint fades, rusts off, or gets painted over. A spring with no readable colour is completely normal on an older door, and it changes nothing for a professional: the technician identifies it by measuring the wire, the inside diameter, the length, and the wind direction directly. The missing colour is only a problem if you were hoping to order the part yourself, which we do not recommend in any case.

Does the opener brand change which spring I need?

No. The springs are part of the door hardware and are sized to the weight of the door, not to the opener. A LiftMaster, Chamberlain, or any other brand of opener simply guides the door that the springs are counterbalancing. Choosing the right spring is entirely about the door, which is why the four measurements above are what matter.

Conclusion

The colours on a garage door spring are a small, clever piece of engineering shorthand. On a torsion spring, the cones tell you wind direction and a stripe tells you wire size; on an extension spring, one colour tells you the weight the pair can lift. Learning to read them turns a mysterious tangle of steel above your door into something you can actually understand, and it makes you a sharper customer when it is time to buy. What the colour cannot do is replace the caliper, the training, and the tools that turn an identification into a correct, balanced, safe repair. Read the colour, photograph it, and hand the rest to a professional.

If a spring on your London-area door has broken, or you simply want to know exactly what is hanging above your car, our team is happy to identify your springs, run a balance check, and quote a correctly matched replacement. Call 519-619-7901, send a note through our contact page, or browse new doors and openers on our price estimator. AA Advantage Doors has been keeping London-area doors balanced and running safely since 2009, and our BBB profile has the service history.