Your garage doors comprise a complex series of parts and components working together to keep your vehicles and home safe. When your system operates as it should, you usually don’t notice anything except for the odd noise or two. However, as time passes, these pieces of hardware are put under increased pressure and wear away from repeated use. If they’re left unattended, you can see some critical parts, like your torsion springs, snap and break prematurely.
Taking better care of your garage door torsion springs can help extend the lifespan of your entire installation. While replacing your torsion springs on your own is ill-advised, you can still take specific steps to safely maintain your garage door torsion springs.
Where Are the Torsion Springs?
Knowing where the torsion springs are located on your garage door will help make your maintenance a more streamlined experience. These components are the long coiled springs situated horizontally at the top of the garage door. Now that you know where they’re located, you can formulate a plan to keep them well-maintained.
Know How to Identify Potential Problems
Every garage door spring is different and unique. Understanding how your springs function can help you with identifying problems with your springs before they worsen. Taking a proactive approach to your maintenance tasks can ensure your garage door has a long lifespan.
When it comes to safely maintaining your springs, it helps to know the most common problems that can affect them and how the underlying cause can be fixed. With so many potential sources of issues, learning to identify them quickly can help make your maintenance process go as smoothly as possible. Here are some of the ways you can identify problems before they ruin your system:
Check to See If Your Springs Are Broken
If someone were to visibly inspect their springs, they should be looking to make sure one spring isn’t broken and the following are still intact:
- That they are securely fastened to the center bearing bracket
- That the center bearing bracket holding the springs is securely fastened to the spring pad or wall
- That if there is a spring pad, it's securely fastened with no space between it and the wall.
While you can perform a thorough visual inspection of your springs, attempting to fix them on your own can prove dangerous. Garage door springs are under a great deal of pressure and can exert an alarming amount of force if they’re handled improperly. Instead of attempting to make the repairs yourself, it’s best if you call in a garage door spring repair specialist to handle the situation.
You Start Hearing Strange Sounds
If you hear peculiar noises from your torsion springs, such as popping sounds, whenever you open the door, it could be time to apply some lubricant. Over time, the lubrication on these components wears away, and it can lead to grinding, popping, and more. Reapplying lubricant to your springs can help penetrate and neutralize rust and clean corrosion and oxidation from the spring.
The lubrication should help reduce the popping and other strange noises. However, if you notice the sounds persist after your maintenance, it’s time to call in a proven garage door repair specialist in Kalamazoo County, MI to take a closer look. Be careful not to adjust the springs on your own. These parts are under tremendous tension, creating a great deal of potential energy. One wrong move leads to serious injury to yourself and anyone around you, so leave alterations to the springs themselves to the professionals.
Get the Right Size Spring
Sometimes, the problem with your torsion springs stems from the initial installation. For example, if your previous garage door installer in Kalamazoo County, MI didn’t size your torsion spring, it could lead to your garage door breaking down prematurely. If you aren’t sure your setup has the correctly sized torsion springs, we can help.
Know What Kind of Lifespan Your Springs Have
Every garage door spring has a set lifespan that can give homeowners a reasonable timeline for when they need to replace their springs. For the standard variety garage door spring, 10,000 cycles are the average. However, if you want a more durable option for your garage door, we offer our customers springs on the higher end of the scale at 25,000 and 80,000 cycles.
Let Fawley Overhead Door Handle the Job
If your torsion springs have been giving you problems, knowing how to properly maintain them can help reduce your anxiety about them. Fawley Overhead Door works with our customers to understand what’s wrong with their doors and repair their torsion springs. So schedule your next appointment with our garage door specialists today!
