Finally automated our driveway gate after three years of…
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Finally automated our driveway gate after three years of getting out of the truck in the rain
"When we first moved out here we thought manually opening the gate every single time would be fine. It's not fine. Three years of doing it in the dark, in the rain, in the middle of winter finally broke me.
The gate is a single wooden swing, about 14 feet wide and pretty heavy. That was my first problem when I started looking into automating it because a lot of the smaller operators I came across weren't really rated for anything that heavy. Spent way more time researching than I expected.
I went pretty deep on it honestly. I was looking at everything trying to understand what I actually needed before spending money. At one point I was browsing automatic gate motor listings on Alibaba, Amazon... just to get a sense of what the components cost at the source. Ended up going with a Ram operator based on recommendations from a few farm forums.
Install was a whole thing. Our post wasn't set up for automation so I had to reinforce it before mounting anything. Took the better part of a day just to get the limit switches adjusted right.
Been running about five months now with no issues. Added a battery backup because we lose power out here pretty regularly and I didn't want to be back to opening it manually every time a storm rolls through.
Anyone else retrofit automation onto an existing heavy wooden gate? Curious what operators people are running.
"
#home
source
"When we first moved out here we thought manually opening the gate every single time would be fine. It's not fine. Three years of doing it in the dark, in the rain, in the middle of winter finally broke me.
The gate is a single wooden swing, about 14 feet wide and pretty heavy. That was my first problem when I started looking into automating it because a lot of the smaller operators I came across weren't really rated for anything that heavy. Spent way more time researching than I expected.
I went pretty deep on it honestly. I was looking at everything trying to understand what I actually needed before spending money. At one point I was browsing automatic gate motor listings on Alibaba, Amazon... just to get a sense of what the components cost at the source. Ended up going with a Ram operator based on recommendations from a few farm forums.
Install was a whole thing. Our post wasn't set up for automation so I had to reinforce it before mounting anything. Took the better part of a day just to get the limit switches adjusted right.
Been running about five months now with no issues. Added a battery backup because we lose power out here pretty regularly and I didn't want to be back to opening it manually every time a storm rolls through.
Anyone else retrofit automation onto an existing heavy wooden gate? Curious what operators people are running.
"
#home
source
| 2,000 mlx | |
| 3 | |
| 0 |