Doing Nothing For Now
A torsion spring rated for a certain number of cycles doesn't care that it's mild outside. It just counts openings and closings. Houses built in the 1967-1992 window that make up most of this area are now old enough that original springs, if they were never swapped, are well past any reasonable cycle count. Waiting doesn't make the math better - it just means the spring lets go on a day you didn't plan for, usually with the door half up. Cables fray the same way, especially on double doors where the drums have been carrying uneven tension for years without anyone noticing. Rollers on 1970s-era steel doors wear their tracks into shapes that make the door bind before they ever look bad from the driveway. None of this is urgent until it is, and then it's urgent all at once. Deferring a spring or cable job on a door this age is a bet that the parts hold one more year - sometimes it pays off, sometimes it costs you a stuck car and a dented panel from forcing it.
What the Weather Here Does to It
San Diego sits in a mild temperate band, and that cuts both ways for a garage door. You don't get the freeze-thaw cycling that snaps seals in a single winter, and you don't get the summer heat spikes that warp a steel panel in an afternoon. That's the good news. The slower story is that weather seals and draughts on doors from the 1967-1992 building era were never designed to last fifty years regardless of climate, and mild weather just means the rubber degrades on its own clock - UV and ordinary daily temperature swings, not extremes - rather than getting torn apart by one bad storm. So the failure mode here isn't dramatic. It's a bottom seal that's gone stiff and cracked, letting in draughts along the slab, or a weather strip around the frame that's shrunk enough to leave a gap you can see daylight through. Because the climate here doesn't force the issue with a hard freeze or a heat wave, these seals often get ignored well past the point where a fifteen-minute swap would've solved it, and owners live with the draught instead.
