Guide

Spring Cycles, and Why Arizona Is Hard on a Standard Spring

What a spring cycle is, why builder springs fail after about seven years in the Valley, and what high cycle springs cost. From a Scottsdale garage door company.

A garage door spring is rated in cycles, and one cycle is the door going up once and down once. A standard builder spring is rated at about 10,000 cycles. The high cycle springs we fit are rated 25,000 to 50,000. If your door runs four times a day, that is the difference between about seven years and twenty.

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One Cycle Is Up Once And Down Once

The spring on the bar above your door is the part that actually lifts the door. The opener only steers it. A 16 by 7 insulated double door weighs somewhere between 180 and 250 pounds, and the half horsepower motor bolted to your ceiling cannot lift that. What it does is nudge a door that the spring has already balanced to almost nothing.

Springs are rated by how many times they can do that before the steel gives up. One cycle is one trip up and one trip back down. Not one day, not one week. If two people leave for work and come back, and somebody goes out in the evening, that door has done four to six cycles before dinner.

Do the arithmetic on a builder spring and the number stops being abstract. A 10,000 cycle spring at five cycles a day is 2,000 days, which is about five and a half years. At four cycles a day it is closer to seven. That is why springs in the Valley break on houses that feel new to the people living in them, and it is why they so often break in the same year on the same street: the whole subdivision got the same spring on the same day.

What Arizona Does To The Number

The cycle rating is measured in a laboratory. A garage in Phoenix is not one. Three things here take the rating down rather than up.

Heat

An attached garage in July sits well above the outside temperature, and the spring is up near the ceiling where it is hottest. Steel under constant torsion that is repeatedly heated and cooled relaxes faster than steel that is not. A spring does not have to snap to have failed: a spring that has lost tension hands the weight of the door to the opener, and then the opener is the part you are buying instead.

Dust

Fine desert dust gets into the coils and into the bearings the shaft turns in. It is a mild abrasive and it sits in old lubricant. A dry, gritty spring works harder than a clean, lubricated one on every single cycle, and it is the reason a tune up is worth more here than in a mild climate.

The way people use a garage in a hot city

In a climate where nobody wants to walk from the street in August, the garage becomes the front door. Nobody uses their actual front door. That pushes the daily cycle count up, which is the one number in the whole calculation that a homeowner controls, and almost nobody wants to control it.

How To Tell A Spring Has Gone Without Touching Anything

You can check all of this standing in the doorway with the light on.

There is a gap of about two inches in the coil on the bar above the door. A torsion spring that breaks separates cleanly, and the gap is obvious once you know to look for it.
The door is suddenly far too heavy to lift by hand, or you cannot lift it at all.
The opener strains, lifts the door a few inches, then sets it back down.
You heard a bang like a gunshot from the garage, sometimes hours or days before the door stopped working. A spring often breaks while nobody is using the door.
There is a fine dust of rust on the floor under the spring bar.

If any of those are true, do not try to lift the door by hand and do not park underneath it. With the spring gone the door weighs what it actually weighs, and the only thing holding it is a motor that was never designed to hold it.

Standard Or High Cycle, With Real Numbers

A broken torsion spring replaced, with the door re-balanced and tested, is 180 to 290 dollars per spring fitted, depending on the size of the spring. A high cycle spring in place of a standard one is 80 to 120 dollars more per spring, again by size. The service call is 35 dollars and it comes off the price if the work goes ahead.

So the upgrade costs roughly the price of a tune up and buys you two to five times the life. On a door that is used like a front door, which in this city is most of them, that is the easiest decision on the whole invoice. On a door that gets used twice a week in a second garage, a standard spring is honestly fine and we will tell you so.

Why Both Springs Get Replaced

On a door with two springs we replace both, and that happens on about 98 percent of jobs. It is not an upsell, it is arithmetic. Both springs have lifted the same door the same number of times, so a spring that has not broken yet is sitting at the end of the same life as the one that just did. Replacing one means paying a second service call within a year or so, and it means the door runs unbalanced in the meantime, which wears the opener.

If you want one spring only, we will fit one spring. It is your door and your money. We will just say once what we think and then get on with it.

Answers

Questions People Ask About This

How long should a garage door spring last in Arizona?

A standard builder spring rated around 10,000 cycles lasts roughly five to seven years on a door used four or five times a day, and Valley heat and dust take that down rather than up. A high cycle spring rated 25,000 to 50,000 lasts two to five times as long on the same door.

Can I replace a garage door spring myself?

No. A torsion spring stores enough energy to break bones, and it is wound under tension with bars that will take your hands off if the spring lets go. This is the one repair on a garage door where the honest advice is to pay somebody.

How much does a garage door spring cost?

180 to 290 dollars per spring fitted, by size, plus 35 dollars for the service call which comes off the price if the work goes ahead. High cycle springs are 80 to 120 dollars more per spring.

Is it bad to use the door with a broken spring?

Yes. The opener is then lifting the full weight of the door, which is what strips the drive gear and burns out the motor. A 289 dollar gear kit or a new opener is the usual price of a few more days of use.

If You Would Rather We Just Looked At It

This is what we do all day. Every job is priced on the price list, the service call is 35 dollars and it comes off the price if the work goes ahead, and you get the exact number on the phone before anyone is booked.

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