This is gonna be a long read. So grab a frosty beverage and some popcorn and hold on tight. Or scroll past because this won't be particularly witty but it'll at least be informative. I'll try to throw some levity in for good measure, though. So, I really wanted to like this. No, I wanted to LOVE this. It's basically the only "security"-minded dog door on the market that's easy to install and readily available. So, I'll lead with the good stuff: the Pros. Pros: - It technically works. Well, it *technically* works TOO well, in fact. More on that later. - It was fairly easy to install. - It looks about as good as you can expect a giant, beige, plastic dog door to look. But it won't win any style points and you won't see it at the Consumer Electronics Show or Paris Fashion Week. And now is where I get in the real meat-'n'-potatoes: the Cons. I'll break them down into subcategories for ya so you can more easily digest the dumpster fire I'm about to throw your way. Cons, Part 1: Superficial Things That Make Me Look Like a Primadonna 1. The SmartKey tag for your dog's collar is enormous for what it is and does. It's meant to hold a battery akin to watch battery and contain the RF transmitter, but the thing is way too big. It looks like a plug for a large ice chest. It's klunky, looks stupid on my dogs collar, makes lots of noise despite my best efforts to silence it with velcro instead of a typical metal ring. Overall, it's like the design of this piece of the kit was a complete afterthought. Billy in "Design" was like, "Oh, shoot, guys! We completely forgot how the dogs are supposed to open this thing! What should we do?" And his boss was like, "Who cares? It's just a dog." Send 'em back to the drawing board because it just sucks. 2. It's loud. When it "unlocks" it makes a fairly loud "Pop!" Like, we can hear it from literally every room in our 1300 sqf home covering two floors. It even wakes us up in the middle of the night. (More on this later, too.) This is good and bad, sorta - but really, it's all bad because the door just doesn't work as intended. 3. It comes in two sizes: Teacup Chihuahua and Pygmy Horse / Great Dane. Yes, small and large. That's it. There is no medium size for those of us with medium-sized dogs. You know, like the VAST majority of dog owners. The small is so tiny don't even think about anything bigger than a small Jack Russel getting through. So we had to go with the large for our 44-pound dog that's only about 18" high at his shoulder. But that's not all! Because this door is just so suitable for larger quadrupeds, medium-build adult males can also fit through the dog door with no problem. That couldn't possibly be a security risk. No way! But huzzah! What an unexpected treat to allow most of the adult male population access to our home! Also, more on this later. Cons, Part 2: Radio Frequencies and the Physics-Defying Dog Door. 1. The door doesn't work as advertised. At all. So here's the deal. The door is supposed to have variable sensitivity. Not sensitive at all means the dog is, in theory, directly in front of the door before it pops open. Medium sensitivity means he/she is like, oh, some arbitrary distance the manufacturer states. For fun, let's say it's 5 feet away. Then at high sensitivity, the dog can be up to 15 feet away or something. Again, the number seems arbitrary and makes no sense. It's like that show "Whose Line Is It Anyway" hosted by Drew Carrey were "the rules are made up and the points don't matter." So when you initially set it up, the instructions make you go through this sorta ridiculous process of putting your dog's collar on your leg then pushing a couple of buttons on the door then adjusting this silly little sensitivity dial then walking by the door to make sure the door unlocks. Honestly, you'll look like a total fool when you're doing this. Just make sure nobody's around. At any rate, I do all this. Follow the directions to the "T". All seems great. I put the collar on my dog with the supposedly perfect sensitivity level and the thing doesn't work. I had it set so it would Pop! and unlock with doggo about 5 feet away. Now, on Trial #1, he's standing right in front of the door and pushing his head against it and nothing. Finally after 4 seconds the door decides to cooperate. I go through the process again. This time I figure it needs to be more sensitive to get past that weird little schism we just had. I'm giving this piece of junk the benefit of the doubt. This time it unlocks about the same place as last time. Success!? Hahahaha. No. Silly me. A broken clock is correct twice a day, right? Next time doggo tries to go out, it doesn't unlock at all. At all. Makes no sense. So I conduct an experiment to find out how screwed up this thing is. I go through the initial setup process again to set the sensitivity. I do it for three settings: lowest, medium, and most sensitive based on the silly little sensitivity dial. To keep things as scientific as possible, I hold doggo in "the staging area" at the base of the stair and call him to the dog door via the same route the the kitchen each time. I do this ten times for each sensitivity level and mark/measure where he is when the dog door Pops! So 30 times (I'm not joking - I really AM this determined) I did this. At the end of the 30th run on the highest sensitivity level where, presumably, the door should Pop! from as far away as possible, I noticed three things: a. No two successive tries at any sensitivity level yielded the same results. The first run it'd Pop! at 4 feet away. The next run it'd Pop! at 10 feet. The third time it'd Pop! only after doggo was sitting in front of the door for 2-4 seconds. b. There was not even a grouping for each sensitivity level that would indicate a rough distance that would correlate to the specific sensitivity level. All three sensitivity levels were seemingly random for when the dog door would decide to Pop! c. The distances and associated graphs for all three sensitivity levels could be interchangeable. All three were so randomized for the data showing when the door decided to Pop! that clearly the sensitivity dial is merely for show. The dial is a lie! 2. Because the dog door clearly does what it wants, it's a good thing (I guess) that it's quite loud. It alerts my dog that he's free to pass through the flap during the many, MANY instances where he's standing in front of it and the door doesn't work. It's like some twisted Pavlovian trick that I'm putting my doggo through every time he has to pee or poop. Seems almost cruel...I can only imagine doggo thinking, "Will the door open? Will I be able to go outside to pee? Will I have to pee right here? I don't know!!" Keep in mind, this has happened since Day 1, so this isn't a battery issue. It's a cruddy product issue. 3.Also because it's so loud, we can hear it when it opens on its own in the middle of the night. Yes. In the middle of the night. The same door that won't open when doggo is right in front of it somehow thinks it's appropriate to Pop! at 2 AM, then again at 5:30 AM. During these times, doggo is of course in bed. His bed is at a vectored distance of about 40 feet from the door. Vectored because his bed is upstairs in the northwest corner of the house whilst the door is downstairs in the southeast corner of the house. Also keep in mind that there's multiple plaster walls (I know...plaster is the WORST!) and a plaster ceiling and hardwood floors. I literally have a hard time getting WiFi signal to where his bed is when the wireless router is even closer than the dog door. That's not how physics and radio frequency propagation works. There's no way on this planet that his collar is activating it. And no, it's not their neighbors dog because they don't have dogs. This also happens during the day, again, when he's nowhere near the door. Over a 7-day period I counted the times the door spontaneously opened. It averaged 5 times per day. That's assuming
