Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsGood door, poor installation instructions
Reviewed in the United States on June 11, 2015
This is a good dog door once installed. I would give the final product 5 stars. However, the installation experience with this was horrible, and if I were to base my rating on that, I would have given it 1 star. I gave it the average of those two numbers, 3 stars.
Here are my gripes about the installation and instructions:
- Other Pet Mate products I've installed had template that you could tape to the door, trace around, then cut out. For this door, they want you to tape one of the plastic pieces to the door, trace the inside, then add some padding to that. Not that big of a deal, but would have been way easier with a template.
- They require that you cut the bolts to fit your door. They should have included bolts for a standard door, and then also longer bolts that could be cut to size if needed. After cutting the bolts, unless you have a tool that cuts them extremely clean, it gets pretty tough to thread the nut onto the bolt. I had to go purchase more bolts from the hardware store because of this.
- Getting the plastic liners to fit in between the two plastic pieces through the door is tough to do for one person, since there isn't really anything holding everything together at that point of the install. I had to have my wife come help hold everything together. Could have been designed better.
- You need to pay attention to which side you insert the nuts and bolts. One side of the plastic is molded in a hexagon shape so that the nut will hold in place when screwing in the bolt. I didn't see this at first, and it was (obviously) tough to screw it in backwards. A note about this in the instructions would have been nice.
- They provide you with inserts to cover the holes for the nuts and bolts, however they are a VERY tight fit, and I actually had to cut two of them down just so that they would fit into the holes.
Anyways, after finally getting everything installed, the door works well. Sometimes it won't come to a close after my dog goes through it, but I think that it will get better as it wears a little.
