The POWER PET Story We Set Out to Fight Fleas And Ended Up With The Most Amazing Pet Door On Earth
The 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. 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. After manufacturing millions of these tiny ultrasound emitting collars, it dawned on us that the product may have other applications besides driving fleas crazy. We began developing several pet operated devices that used the "flea collar" as a pet worn transmitter. The Power Pet Door was one of our first ideas.
But, the original one we built in 1992 bears little resemblance to the mature design we manufacture today. The original was was large, heavy, loud and had an annoying tendency to crush anything in its path when closing. 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 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. In 1993 we built one hundred of these units using a milled wood frame. The doors sold out in one week. We then left the project dormant, thinking that such a product couldn’t be more than a fad or niche market type of item. 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. Our first production version, the PP series was introduced in the year 2000. It used an extruded metal frame enclosed by Plexiglass panels. To our shock, customer orders quickly rose into the thousands, making it obvious that we had more than a niche market on our hands.
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. We also learned thousands of ways that a motorized pet door can fail in real world use. 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. The result was a relatively inexpensive, technically advanced automatic pet door, built to last a lifetime.
Our new PX series incorporates major improvements based upon a wealth of field knowledge, comments, suggestions and yes, complaints from early users. It uses an engineered ABS plastic composite that is actually stronger and more precise than its metal predecessor. Our new VP of Engineering, Bob Schilken, one of the most accomplished analog electronic engineers in the world, contributed the extremely creative directional ultrasonic detection circuitry that performs rings around conventional infared, magnetic and RFID circuits. Bob's ingenious circuitry reliably opens the door only for your pet's collar and only when your pet is on a direct approach, not when the critter is just wandering by. Bob also developed a new type of pulse width modulated motor controller that keeps the lift motor running cool and quite.
Our amazing new PX series is phenomenally successful due to its affordability, reliability, ease of installation and attractive design. It is now the most successful pet door in history outselling any other individual pet door made. The Power Pet Door PX series is sold by every major retailer including Walmart, Sam’s Club, Petco, Pet Smart, The Home Depot, Lowe’s, Amazon and countless others. We have since noticed several competitors attempting to copy our patented design. However, so far no one has been able to match the quality, performance and affordable cost of our genuine POWER PET® brand. We are proud to manufacture this extremely advanced product and we're sure that if you and your pets decide to give it a try, you will agree that “Nothing Compares to a Genuine Power Pet!” (And don’t be surprised if you also find that Fido’s fleas mysteriously stop coming around.)