Does Your Spring Look Like This?
Every spring on every garage door will eventually break. It is a matter of metal fatigue, not maintenance. There are many factors that go into how long a spring will last. Most manufacturers will supply a spring with 10,000 cycles in its life. One cycle is when a door goes up once and down once. If you use your door 4 times a day, that would be two adults leaving at different times and returning at different times, you will cross 10,000 uses in 2,500 days, or less than 7 years. When you include kids in the mix, it becomes obvious that a garage door spring can break fairly often.
There are many companies that offer a “lifetime” warranty on the springs they install. Is this the lifetime of the spring? The lifetime of the door? As long as you own the home? Or maybe the lifetime of the company offering the lifetime warranty? Our company gives a lifetime warranty on springs, and we back it up with the science of steel.
The more spring material you have in a spring the more cycles you will get out of it. If a company offers a lifetime warranty, but can’t explain why their springs will last longer, then you can bet the spring will be warrantied as long as that company keeps its name. (A common practice in this industry is to sell the company and then begin a new company with a different name, and thus negating that “lifetime” warranty.) The garage door industry is full of ways to make sure a warranty still costs the customer in the end.