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Driveway Gates- Automated

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Thank you! I didn’t realize yesterday the box # wasn’t covered up. I loved your reply though!

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We’ve actually had a lot of deliveries this year – totally remodeled a kitchen, replaced our washer and dryer, purchased pieces of furniture, I’ve been ordering pairs of shoes (lol). But the small and medium stuff gets placed inside the gate (Nordstrom order – shoes, of course – dropped off that way a few minutes ago via USPS Priority Mail), large boxes are leaned against the front gate, and major deliveries (appliances, furniture) have always been scheduled for a specific window of time.

Our office is five minutes away, worst case, the driver calls us and we hie on home to open the gate. I’m more comfortable with that than with giving our gate code out, although I think our system has a way to support multiple codes, to provide a code for delivery driver (or whoever) that’s only usable for a short time, rather than give that person the one we use. We’ve never bothered with that feature.

Having horses – especially small, cute, friendly ones – we don’t want people on our property unless we’re here. We’ve had the experience of neighbors (barely acquaintances, not friends) bringing over children (ones visiting them, so we didn’t know these kids or their parents) unannounced, to interact with our horses. Our gate is kept locked and our place is posted since then.

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My Mighty Mule gate uses a magnetic sensor buried next to the driveway inside the gate to send a signal to the controller to open the gate as a vehicle approaches to exit, and to keep the gate open until the vehicle clears the gate when coming in.

I learned the hard way that some aluminum horse trailers do not have enough iron mass to activate the magnetic sensor, thus the gate starts closing right after the tow vehicle is clear, right into the trailer. A steel gate can pull off an aluminum trailer fender if it hooks it just right, and do significant gate damage as well.

That is why we nixed automatic closing of any kind.
We close it like we open it, with the pad, an app on the phone or a clicker on hand, like those for automatic garage openers.

Ours has sensors that, if anything breaks the beam between them, as in driving into the gate path, the gate quits moving until told to move again.

Gate moves slowly, so hard for anything to be in the path of the gate before it stops because of crossing security beams.

We’ve had a few brands and by far found Ghost to be the best quality and most reliable.

I don’t live someplace with snow, but I’d think if you set the gates a little higher up (though then a dog could fit under) would alleviate most of the stuck-on-snow risk.
We have an auto-close feature and have it set very generously. You can also install the beam that detects something in the gate so it won’t close.

I have a keypad on the outside (pin provided to USPS, PS, dumpster pick-up, etc) and an auto sensor on the exit side.