Why a Cold Snap Breaks Springs in Montgomery Garages

By Montgomery Garage Door Pros · Published October 22, 2026 · Updated October 22, 2026

The Problem

Most of the houses we work on in the Montgomery service area went up between 1984 and 2007, with the typical build year landing around 1994. That means most garage doors out there are running the torsion or extension springs that came with the house, now two to four decades old. Steel fatigues with cycles, not with calendar years, but cold makes it worse. When a spring goes in cold weather, it's usually because the metal has already lost most of its temper from thirty years of lifts and the one hard contraction on a freeze night is what finally snaps a coil that was already close to done. You'll hear it as a loud bang, usually right as the door is sitting shut overnight. The door won't open the next morning, or it'll open crooked and stop halfway. That's the spring, not the opener, even though the opener usually gets blamed first because it's the part that visibly refuses to work.

Leaving It Alone

A broken spring doesn't fix itself and it doesn't get cheaper to ignore. The opener will keep trying to lift a door with no spring tension, which burns out the motor or strips the gear, turning a spring job into a spring-and-opener job. With median household income in the area at $65,614, that's a real difference in what the repair ends up costing, not a rounding error. Some owners run the door manually for a few days while they wait on a schedule opening, which is fine for a day or two but not as a routine - the cables and drums aren't built to be hand-cranked repeatedly and they'll fray or jump the drum if you keep forcing it. If the door is a double door with two springs and only one has gone, the other is carrying the full load and usually follows within weeks, not months. Waiting to fix both at once sounds efficient until the second one lets go while the car's halfway out of the garage.

How Local Conditions Play In

Montgomery sits in a mild climate band with occasional freezes rather than a hard winter, which is part of why spring failures here catch people off guard - you're not expecting cold-weather problems in a place that doesn't get consistent cold. But it only takes one overnight freeze to do the damage, and the swing from a 60-degree afternoon to a 28-degree night is actually harder on already-fatigued steel than a steady cold snap would be, because the metal keeps expanding and contracting instead of just sitting cold. Across the nine named areas we work in around Montgomery, the housing stock is mostly 1980s and 90s construction, so a lot of garages still have their original hardware paired with openers that have been swapped once or twice over the years. If you're out toward Pike Road or Coosada rather than in town, your house is still part of that same 1984-2007 build wave, so the same spring age applies even though the drive is longer.

Checking It Yourself

You can look at a few things before calling anyone. With the door closed, check the spring above the door - a torsion spring with a visible gap in the coil is broken, full stop. On older houses with side-mounted extension springs, look for a spring that's stretched out longer than its twin, or a safety cable that's gone slack because the spring already let go. Listen for anything grinding or squealing when the door moves, since a dry or worn roller is a cheaper fix now than a jumped track later. What you shouldn't do is loosen or remove a torsion spring yourself - these are wound under real tension and letting one go wrong has put people in the hospital. That's the one job on a garage door I'll tell any owner to leave alone, no matter how handy they are with the rest of the house.

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