Posted January 17th, 2020 at 12:57 pm by Dan Musick
Buying garage door springs can be complicated, since there are a lot of different varieties on the market. We hope that this guide will help you find the exact type of spring you need.
1. Identify the type of spring you have.
On our Garage Door Springs page, we show eight types of springs:
- Standard Garage Door Torsion Springs
- Wayne Dalton TorqueMaster Torsion Springs
- Sectional Garage Door Extension Springs
- Clopay, Ideal and Holmes Garage Door EZ-Set Torsion Springs
- One-Piece Garage Door Extension Springs
- Self-Storage Roll-up Door Springs
- Commercial and Industrial Torsion Springs
- Steel Rolling Door Torsion Springs.
2. Identify the specific variety of spring you will need to buy.
Depending on the type of door springs you have, the next step is to measure the springs, weigh the door, or use an ID number to identify the springs or type of door you have.
Measuring springs.
We recommend measuring the standard residential torsion springs, self-storage roll-up door springs, standard commercial and industrial torsion springs, as well as the steel rolling door torsion springs. The only way to order springs for one-piece garage doors is by measuring them. You can find instructions for measuring springs on our One-Piece Garage Door Extension Springs page.
Weighing the Door.
Many do-it-yourselfers prefer to weigh their garage door, and that is often the only way to determine the springs you need. Therefore, this method works with sectional doors with standard, EZ Set, TorqueMaster or extension springs.
weigh the door and measure its width and height.
There are two ways to weigh a garage door. Firstly, if you have standard torsion springs, you can usually insert a bar into the cone of the unbroken spring and backwind the spring as we show in our How to Weigh a Garage Door YouTube video.
Another way to weigh a door is to raise the door and slide the scale underneath. If the springs are still tensioned, the cables will need to be vise-gripped to allow the full weight of the door to rest on the scale. In particular, our YouTube video titled How To Weigh a Garage Door shows how to do this. This method is helpful for normal residential and commercial sectional doors with torsion or extension springs, Wayne Dalton TorqueMaster systems, and doors with the EZ Set spring system.
Identify the Door or Springs.
If it is neither convenient nor possible to measure the springs or weigh the door, a third option is to use the ID numbers that some manufacturers provide. You can find more detailed information about garage door IDs on our blog post titled “How to Identify Doors by Model Number, Serial Number, and PID Numbers.” This is especially helpful for the Clopay, Holmes, and Ideal garage doors. Additionally, Wayne Dalton doors usually identify the springs on labels stuck to the outside of the tube.
Raynor doors also often have metal tags that identify their springs.
The metal tag usually begins with the door serial number, which in this photo is 898185. Next is the wire size: .225, and then the length of 21 inches. The “B” designates the 2 1/4″ inside diameter, while the “R/L” designates a pair of springs: one right wind and one left wind spring. Therefore, on a single spring setup, only one letter for the wind appears.
3. Order springs based on the type.
The final step is to order garage door springs based on the information gathered in the first two steps. We have a page listing different spring types, which are also listed in the links in Step 1 above. All things considered, most springs ship the same or next day. In addition, these links on the bottom of every page should help: Contact Information & Hours, How to Order, and Shipping and Pick Up Information.
Instructions for replacing your garage door springs can be found on our tutorial page. Our blog post “how to replace garage door springs” will also help you find the resources you need.
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