The Symptom
The door hesitates about a third of the way up
Then either stalls or the opener strains and reverses it. Some mornings it lifts fine. On colder mornings it doesn't. Owners usually blame the opener first because that's the part making noise, but the opener is often just the part telling you something else has failed.
What's actually happening
The torsion spring, wound decades ago to lift a specific door weight, has lost enough tension that the opener motor is now doing the spring's job as well as its own. Motors aren't built for that. They'll limp along for months, sometimes longer, before something gives - a stripped gear, a snapped cable, or the spring itself letting go all at once.
In Hampton specifically, this shows up a lot because of when the housing went up
A door installed when a house was built in 1977 is a door running on 1977 hardware unless someone's already swapped it. Nobody flags a slow spring the way they'd flag a water heater. It just gets worse a little at a time until one day it doesn't open at all.
