As with a lot of people we had stray cats coming in eating our cats food so we chipped him and purchased this door. We ruled out a collar smart as he is a free roamer.
Our cat is very sensitive and It took weeks to train him through the new door Because:
1) The unlocking mechanism, Although Relatively quiet, quiet is loud enough to upset him.
2) The loop sensor Seemed at times not to respond to the chip, more so if the chip was very close to the sensor - very strange.
3) Our cat has long legs and the sensor coil is a bit daunting When used together with a door tunnel extension.
4) The programmable locking delay is only 25secs max, and its very loud noise makes training a nervous cat difficult.
The intermittent operation of the door so made our cat quite neurotic. For a while he lost all trust in it. We saved ourselves and our cat a lot of hassle by buying a few chips from our Vet and programming them to Independently test the door operation. Fortunately the cat door which mounted on an old wooden cellar door so we removed the sensor coil and mounted it higher up. This does not seem to make sense as the received signal would normally be weaker but for us it helped a lot. This solved the problem 2) and 3).
The locking mechanism is really cheaply made and needs to be improved. Imagine you are on holiday and it is -15C and the cat can not get in.
The construction does not install a lot of confidence. At the moment it Appears to be working, but it needs only to fail once and we are back to square one.
So, do not loose the instruction manual!
