Installation advice – one-piece “up & over” retractable garage door

Install
1

Hi folks,

I’m in the UK and I’ve just ordered a Garadget and I’m looking forward to its arrival. I’m thinking ahead to its installation and I’ve noticed that all the instructions focus on segmented or roller shutter type doors, siting the reflector on the top panel of the door. My garage door is a one-piece “up & over” retractable type door which is very common in the UK. On this type of door the top edge of the door is retracted into the garage on tracks but the rest of the door is controlled on each side by vertical spring-loaded swing-arms. This makes the door very light and quiet to operate but means that when closing the door the last 8-10” of movement of the top of the door is virtually linear and the door is almost vertical while the bottom of the door sweeps down into place. My concern is if I follow the instructions to the letter the reflector might be reflecting the laser beam back the controller unit for quite some distance before the garage door is actually fully closed and will give a false open/closed status.

I’m wondering if anyone has any advice on the best place to site the reflector and/or the controller unit for most reliable results? Should I actually be setting the controller unit to point to one side of the door with the reflector mounted to the door on an appropriately angled bracket …would that work?

Many thanks!

Dave

2

If traditional arrangement doesn’t work you can put Garadget on the side of the door and put the reflector sideways so it faces the controller. Similar to this setup:

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3

Hi Denis,

Thanks for your reply. Yes, I can see that would work. To keep it all out of the way and almost invisible I can fix the Garadget controller to the top corner of the door frame and pointing across the door and pop rivet a bracket to the top of the door to mount the reflector. Then I can run suitably long USB and 2-core cables around the mechanism frame.

Thinking about it I might even do this arrangement from the outset actually as I think it would give a more reliable solution than trying to reliably target the reflector that’s moving at 40° and I wouldn’t have to worry about the roof bars on the top of my SUV taking out the controller if I forget to take them off. Is that a USB-A to micro USB cable I would need?

Thanks again,

Dave

4

Sounds like a plan. Garadget uses micro-USB B - similar to those in older Android devices, Amazon Echo etc.

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