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Skylink GM-318 Household Alert Garage Door Moni...

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Works great. Easy installation...and as simple as a baby monitor

Feb 19, 2010

by nuknuk

Rating:

Easy to install, easy to use, just like a baby monitor.

I was worried too and felt taking a huge gamble when I decided to buy this garage door monitor. Reading the not so glowing reviews is not very encouraging. But I need it badly now. I let my nephew stay with us occupying our basement. Being young and working as a coder, he rarely sleeps earlier than 2 AM. Once, he left the garage door open until the next morning. My wife and I was so worried lest anything was stolen in the garage. We have our GPSs in the cars, tools, bikes, etc,. More so, within the last 6 months, we had three burglaries in the neighborhood. And lastly, with the temperature below freezing, the cold temperature will most likely shoot up our energy bill this coming months. Although luckily nothing was stolen that day, we have to do something to at least give us some peace of mind.

My first reaction was to visit Smarthome, a company I know that sells this kind of products. I cannot find anything that is within my budget. So I went back to Amazon and found a number of similar products. The only thing that I found to my liking is this monitor set. The reason is, I want the combination of both audio and visual alarm. Not only that, it is also in the ballpark of what price I want to pay. Made in China.

Just like a baby monitor, there is a transmitter and a receiver. You have 2 options of installing the transmitter; either with the 4 screws or the double sided tape (both comes with the package). I ended up using both as the doubled sided tape would not work because of the extreme temperature. The unit comes with a lithium button battery, install it to the sensor/transmitter with the + up. - This is how the way it works: There is a protruding plastic tube with the transmitter that comes down via gravity. When your garage door goes up, the tube goes down; and that triggers the alarm. When the garage door closes, the plastic tube goes back inside the unit; and that stops the alarm.

The receiver is small, probably a mere 4 inches wide and 3 inches in height. There is a wire antenna, be careful not to accidentally cut it. You plug it through an AC adapter. You can switch the audio alarm (beeps) to hi, low, and you can also turn it off if you need to. We chose the hi setting. I thought it will be an annoying electronic shriek, but it turned out to be a more gentle repeating beeps.

A lot of the complaints mention about the signal coverage. I did not experience any coverage problem. The garage is on the first floor, and we plugged the receiver in our bedroom on the third floor of our townhouse. It works just fine. Could it be that others are having problem because of their house structure? Metal grids, solid walls? Our bedroom is not even directly on top of the garage. So far, I don't have any problem with this product, and completely satisfied.

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