How It Shows Up
Most houses in Fort Hunt went up around 1963
And a lot of them are still running the torsion spring that came with the house. A torsion spring is rated for a number of open-close cycles, not years, but on a typical two-car household that cycle count runs out somewhere between 25 and 35 years of normal use. A spring installed in 1963 has had six decades to get there, whether or not anyone ever touched it.
- 35 years
The tell is usually sudden
The door won't lift, or it lifts a few inches and stops, or you hear a bang from the garage like something let go. That bang is the spring itself snapping under tension, and it's loud enough that people sometimes think a shelf fell over. Less dramatic signs come first if you catch them - the opener straining harder than it used to, the door feeling heavier when you lift it by hand with the opener disconnected, a visible gap in the coil when you look at the spring above the door.
This region sits in a cold-climate band with real winter swings
And steel contracts and gets more brittle in sustained cold. A spring that's already at the end of its cycle life is more likely to go on a frigid morning than a mild afternoon, which is exactly when you don't want to be stuck standing in a driveway figuring out what broke.
