![]() The result was a relatively inexpensive, technically advanced automatic pet door, built to last a lifetime. To solve both these problems we decided to make an investment of over one million dollars in research, development and tooling to perfect the reliability, manufacturability and beauty of the product. We also learned thousands of ways that a motorized pet door can fail in real world use. When the new model was picked up by The Home Depot, we realized to our dismay that we couldn’t possibly produce the units quickly enough using hand machined extruded metal. To our shock, customer orders quickly rose into the thousands, making it obvious that we had more than a niche market on our hands. It used an extruded metal frame enclosed by Plexiglass panels. Our first production version, the PP series was introduced in the year 2000. It was only after being consistently badgered, for years, by friends and neighbors of those original one hundred Power Pet Door owners who wanted to buy one of their own, that we decided to take the project seriously. We then left the project dormant, thinking that such a product couldn’t be more than a fad or niche market type of item. In 1993 we built one hundred of these units using a milled wood frame. The early result was very similar, in principle, to the product we now produce, a slim, compact dc motor drive that uses a cable to lift a light-weight panel, then return the panel slowly and safely with a brake-assisted gravity feed. So, our company president, a mechanical engineer who had designed space vehicles for NASA and nuclear reactor cores for Westinghouse, personally took on the more challenging job of designing a fully automatic, pet operated door that works! The original was was large, heavy, loud and had an annoying tendency to crush anything in its path when closing. The Power Pet Door was one of our first ideas.īut, the original one we built in 1992 bears little resemblance to the mature design we manufacture today. We began developing several pet operated devices that used the "flea collar" as a pet worn transmitter. After manufacturing millions of these tiny ultrasound emitting collars, it dawned on us that the product may have other applications besides driving fleas crazy. This device, developed by our brilliant, if not a little wacky, electronics engineer, turned out to be the smallest ultrasonic transmitter on Earth for its power range. T he story of the Power Pet Door begins in 1986 when, as a young company, in our effort to find a better way to fight fleas, we introduced the now famous, Electronic Flea Collar. We Set Out to Fight Fleas And Ended Up With
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