Torsion springs when wound up apply a balance of weight to the torsion pole and the pole is attached to 2 cable drums that wind up the cable attached to the bottom of door. This is the preferred spring system to have on a sectional roll up door. When manufactures design garage doors the springs required have to be strong enough to counterbalance the weight of the door. Sometimes it is necessary to have two different size springs to achieve optimal door balance. Since torsion springs come in hundreds of different sizes and strength. If a door is not balanced correctly it will either want to open without much help. This is what they call too hot. If springs don’t have enough tension than they are too heavy to open and will slam down when closing.
get the perfect balance!
The only way to get a perfect balance is to know the exact weight of the whole door. This means weighing the sections and all the hardware that it requires. This will give you exact weight and sometimes have to use two different size springs to achieve optimal balance. There is no reason to be alarmed as a homeowner that a technician put two different size springs on your garage door unless there is a balance problem. Just wait to determine perfect balance in your garage door spring is to be able to lift your garage door with two fingers and the door should go up easily all the way to the top it should not go up easily at first and then all the sudden come really light and then start to open on its own without any help that means that the springs are too hot if you cannot lift your garage door with two fingers easily then you either have a worn out spring or maybe somebody had installed a spring that is not strong enough for your type of garage door.
add tension
Most of the time this can be fixed by just adding a little tension to the garage door springs in order to get a perfect balance. Another way to test the balance of a garage door is to open it up halfway and if the door is in good balance then the door should stay put and not move up or down. This goes for any type of garage door that you might have whether it is a barrel roll up door like a commercial grade garage door or its a sectional roll up garage door with track or if it is a solid one piece door that flips open either way you should be able to open a garage door with us not have it shoot up on you or not have it slam down it should be an easy process to open up and down this will let you know that your door is in perfect balance it should not be easy to open it first and then become heavy when it gets higher up or vice versa these kind of situations can definitely cause problems I have seen garage doors that I have had to be called on a service call and some garage door technician probably didn’t have the correct spring on his truck and decided to use something a little bit smaller or bigger to fix the broken spring and the customer would probably not even know especially if they have a garage door opener they just hit the button to open the door and go about their business the only way to tell if a garage door is balanced correctly is to pool on the emergency release cord to disengage your opener and open your garage door manually by hand you cannot tell if a garage door is in balance when the opener is opening and closing the garage door.
garage door is too hot ?
Garage Door can do some pretty good damage to the garage door and also the garage door opener if a garage door is too hot and when it opens it flies up out of your hands then it always has the potential for the cables to unravel on the drums this will cause the door make the door go crooked and bend track and all kinds of other damage. Also the same thing can happen to the cables if your garage door does not have enough tension on the springs and you struggle to get the door all the way open because there is not enough counterbalance in the springs then when you get the door all the way up then there is not enough tension on the cables to keep them from unraveling on the drums. Spring balance is the most common problem in malfunctions and garage doors where the springs are broken or they are worn out and have lost tension either way it ends up causing major problems so disconnecting your opener and lifting your door by hand at least once a month to make sure everything is OK is definitely a good idea.