Door balance
How well a garage door’s springs offset its weight — a balanced door stays put when stopped halfway with the opener disconnected.
- Balanced — stays where you left it
- Too little tension — slides shut. Springs are the fault.
- Too much tension — pulls upward. Also springs.
Balance is the test that tells you whether the springs are doing their job. Pull the emergency release cord to disconnect the opener, lift the door by hand to about waist height, and let go. A balanced door stays where you left it and can be moved with modest effort.
A door that slides shut has too little spring tension; one that pulls upward has too much. Either way the opener is now carrying load it was never designed to carry, and openers fail early because of it.
Checking balance twice a year takes under a minute and is the cheapest diagnostic available to a homeowner. Correcting it is spring work, and that is not.
Do this test twice a year and note what you find, because balance drifts gradually and a slow change is hard to notice day to day. If the door needs noticeably more effort than it did last time, the springs are losing tension well before they snap, which is useful warning. It also settles the most common argument in this trade: an opener that strains, stalls or reverses is usually a spring problem wearing out the opener, not an opener fault, and replacing the motor without correcting the balance just puts a new one under the same overload.
Balance also shifts with the weather. Steel contracts and lubricant thickens in cold, so a door that sat perfectly through summer can feel noticeably heavier in January without anything having failed — which is why the test is worth doing in both seasons rather than once a year. The other common cause of a sudden change is a new door: an insulated replacement is significantly heavier than the single-skin door it replaced, and if the installer reused the existing springs the balance was wrong before you ever used it. If a door has felt heavy since the day it was fitted, that is the first thing to raise. Keep the installation paperwork if you have it: the spring specification is usually on it, and it settles the question of whether the springs match the door in about a minute.