What the Fix Involves
Most houses in Sunnyvale were built around 2006, and that era of construction favored wide two-car garages with a single 16-foot door instead of two separate single doors. A door that size doesn't run on one spring doing light duty - it needs a matched torsion spring set rated to lift real weight, mounted on a shaft above the opening. When one spring in that pair breaks, the other is usually close behind it, because they were wound and installed together and they age together. The fix is to pull both springs, confirm the shaft and cable drums aren't scored from the unbalanced load the door was running on, and set new springs sized to the actual door weight - not just swap in whatever was on the shelf. On a door this size, guessing the wire size short is how you end up back out here in eight months. We measure the existing spring, check the door weight, and size the replacement to match, every time.
What You Are Seeing
On a double door this size, a broken spring doesn't whisper. You'll hear a bang from the garage, loud enough that people one room over ask what that was. After that, the opener tries to lift the door and either stalls partway up, strains and groans, or lifts a few inches and drops back down - the motor was never built to lift 16 feet of steel without spring assistance. Some owners notice the door looks crooked in the frame first, cocked higher on one side, which usually means one spring in the pair let go while the other is still holding partial tension. Don't keep running the opener through this. Forcing it burns out the drive gear and can bend the top panel of the door, turning a spring job into a door-and-opener job.
What It Costs
We don't have a Sunnyvale-specific price list to quote here, and giving you a number without seeing your door and spring size would be a guess dressed up as a fact. What we can tell you is what drives the cost: whether one spring broke or the matched pair needs replacing, the wire size and length the door requires, and whether the drums or cables show wear from running unbalanced. Houses built around 2006 in this area tend to run double doors with standard torsion hardware, which keeps parts on hand rather than special-order, but we size and price it on-site, not over the phone.
Parts We Carry
We stock torsion springs sized for the double-door torsion setups common in homes built in this stretch of years, along with the cable drums and standard-size cables that typically wear alongside a failing spring. The hardware on a 2006-era door is standard enough that we're not waiting on a special order to get your door running again. What we don't stock is anything built for doors from well before this era - older low-headroom torsion conversions or oddball spring lengths off original 1970s-80s hardware. Those aren't common in Sunnyvale's housing stock, but if your door is an exception, we'll tell you upfront if a part needs to be ordered rather than pretend we have it on the truck.
