Fix it
Garage door will not open
There are three families of cause and they are easy to tell apart. If the opener runs but the door does not move, it is the trolley or a broken spring. If the opener does nothing at all, it is power or the logic board. If the door feels enormously heavy by hand, the spring has gone — and that one is not yours to fix.
Do this first
Pull the red emergency release cord and try to lift the door by hand. If it comes up smoothly and stays where you leave it, the door is fine and the opener is the problem. If it is enormously heavy or crashes down, stop — the spring is broken.
Before you touch anything
Never change your own springs
A torsion spring on a double garage door holds enough stored energy to break an arm, take out teeth, or worse. It is wound under tension with two steel bars, and if one slips it goes at the speed of the thing it was holding up. People are seriously injured doing this every year, and some are killed. There is no YouTube video that makes this safe, and the part costs less than the emergency room.
Need it today?
MF Garage Doors
Door stuck, spring gone, car trapped — ring, do not fill in a form.
Call (863) 592-2143Repairs and service within 40 miles of Sebring — Avon Park, Lake Placid, Wauchula, Arcadia, Lake Wales, Bartow, Frostproof and Winter Haven.
New doors and replacements across central Florida — Tampa, Orlando, Lakeland, Winter Haven, Kissimmee, Clermont, and everywhere between.
2 of 4 are yours to fix
What it usually turns out to be
| Cause | How to tell | What happens next | Yours? |
|---|---|---|---|
| A broken torsion spring | The door is far too heavy to lift, or there is a visible gap in the coiled spring above the opening. Often there was a bang from the garage earlier. | Springs are replaced in pairs by somebody with winding bars and the training to use them. Leave the door down and ring a company. | Call somebody |
| The trolley has disconnected | The opener motor runs and the chain or belt moves, but the door stays put. | The emergency release was pulled and the trolley has not re-engaged. Run the opener until the trolley reaches the carriage and it should click back in. | Yes |
| No power to the opener | No lights, no hum, nothing from the wall button. | Check the plug, the outlet and the breaker. Openers are often on a GFCI outlet that has tripped. | Yes |
| A snapped lift cable | One side of the door is higher than the other, or a cable is hanging loose beside the track. | Cables are under the same tension as the springs. This is a service call, not a repair. | Call somebody |
What it costs
$220 – $400
For a torsion spring, supplied and fitted. National guide range, checked September 2026 — get it in writing.
Other faults
The repair
What actually happens on the visit
- Establishes whether the opener is running at all. A motor that hums without moving and a motor that does nothing are two different jobs.
- Checks the manual lock and the release cord, because a door locked or disconnected is the single most common call-out that turns out to be nothing.
- Lifts the door by hand. If it is enormously heavy, the spring has gone and the visit becomes a spring job — that is the fork in the road.
- If the door is light and balanced, the fault is in the opener: gear, logic board, limits or the wall button, and those are checked in that order because that is their order of likelihood.
How long it takes. Half an hour for a lock, a cord or a remote. An hour to ninety minutes for a spring. A gear kit is a couple of hours, and a logic board depends on whether the part is in the van.
Next time
Can you stop it happening again?
Partly. Annual lubrication and a balance check catch a tiring spring before it strands you, and that is genuinely most of it. A logic board failing after ten years is not preventable and is not your fault.