A broken spring is the single most common garage door failure, and the one you should not try yourself. Torsion and extension springs replaced in London, Ontario, from $229 all in before HST.
Symptoms
Springs do the lifting. The opener only steers. So when a spring goes, the door behaves in a very particular way, and it is rarely subtle.
A torsion spring failing sounds like a gunshot or a heavy pipe dropping, often in the middle of the night when the steel is cold. Nothing else in a garage makes that noise.
Walk in and look at the shaft above the door. A broken torsion spring has a clean two to three inch gap where the coil has separated. Extension springs run along the tracks at the sides and hang loose or stretched when they fail.
The motor runs, the door lifts a few inches, and the opener stops or reverses. It is not the opener failing. It is the opener refusing to lift a door that now weighs its full 80 to 160 pounds on a single, and a good deal more on a double, with nothing helping it.
With the door fully CLOSED and the opener unplugged, pull the red release cord and lift the door a few inches by hand. A healthy door lifts with two fingers and stays where you leave it. A single door weighs 80 to 160 pounds and a double more again, so with a broken spring it feels like lifting a fridge. Never pull that cord while the door is part way open: with a broken spring it will drop.
A weak or broken spring no longer carries the weight on the way down, so the door drops the last stretch. That is a crushing hazard and the reason to stop using the door until it is fixed.
Very common with a two-spring door where only one has broken. The remaining spring lifts part of the way and stalls. Running the opener against it strips gears and bends the top section.
Understanding
Torsion springs sit on a steel shaft above the door opening and unwind to lift it. Extension springs run along the horizontal tracks at each side and stretch instead. Most doors fitted in London in the last twenty years use torsion, which is the safer and longer-lived of the two, but plenty of older homes still have extension springs with safety cables threaded through them.
Either way, a spring is rated in cycles rather than years. One cycle is the door going up and coming back down. A standard residential spring is built for about 10,000 cycles, which sounds enormous until you count four openings a day and arrive at roughly seven years. A household with teenagers, a home business, or a garage used as the main way into the house gets through that in three or four.
Cold matters too, which is why so many springs in this part of Ontario let go in January. Steel is less forgiving at minus twenty, and a spring already near the end of its cycle life is far more likely to fail on the coldest night of the year than on a mild afternoon. It is not the cold that wore it out. The cold just picked the moment.
Rust is the other half of the story. A damp garage, or a door where road salt drips off the car all winter, corrodes the coil from the outside in. Lubricating the spring once or twice a year with a proper garage door lubricant is the cheapest thing a homeowner can do to make a spring last, and it takes about five minutes.
The Repair
Torsion springs hold enough stored energy to break bones. Winding bars, the right spring for the door weight and a proper balance afterwards are what make this a safe job rather than a dangerous one.
Pricing
Real 2026 ranges for the London area. A row naming one job is the all-in price for it before HST: the parts, the labour, the visit and the balance check afterwards, on a typical residential door.
| Spring job | Typical cost |
|---|---|
| Single spring, single door | $229 to $320 |
| Pair of springs, single door | $260 to $400 |
| Pair of springs, double door | $300 to $550 |
| Pair of high-cycle springs, double door | $420 to $620 |
| Oversized set, heavy insulated door | $400 to $550 |
| Lift cables, replaced as a pair | $130 to $350 |
| Off track from a broken spring, springs plus re-rail | $350 to $650 |
Your garage may sit outside these ranges. Door size and weight, spring rating, how much has been damaged and how easy the garage is to work in all move the number, and we tell you before we start, not after. The full breakdown, including why a double door costs more than two singles, is in our spring replacement cost guide, and the spring cycle life guide explains what you are buying when you pay more for a longer-life spring.
Service Area
We cover London and the surrounding area: St. Thomas, Strathroy, Dorchester, Komoka, Ilderton, Lucan, Belmont and Thorndale. The prices on this page are for the London area; somewhere further out can carry a small travel charge, and we tell you that when you book. If you are just outside the area and not sure, call 519-619-7901 and ask. We would rather tell you straight away than have you wait for a callback that says no.
Questions
We would strongly advise against it on a torsion spring. A wound torsion spring stores enough energy to break an arm or worse, and it releases all of it at once if a winding bar slips. Extension springs are less violent but still under load, and both types need the door balanced afterwards to be safe.
A single spring on a single door is $229 to $320 all in before HST. A pair on a single door is $260 to $400, and a pair on a double door is $300 to $550. Those figures include the parts, the labour, the service call and the balance check.
On a two-spring door, yes. Both springs have taken the same number of cycles, so the survivor is close behind. Doing the pair in one visit avoids paying a second service call within a few months.
A standard 10,000-cycle spring lasts roughly seven years in an average household that opens the door four times a day. Heavy use, an unbalanced door and cold, damp garages all shorten that. A 25,000-cycle spring is the usual answer for a busy family.
No. The opener is not built to lift the full weight of the door and will strip its gear trying, and the door can drop hard on the way down. Leave it closed, do not use the opener, and book the repair.
Yes, we carry the common residential sizes, so most spring jobs in London are finished on the first visit we make.
Tell us the door size and what you heard, and we will bring the right spring the first time.
📋 Book a Spring Repair 📞 Call 519-619-7901