Review: Our new pet door: the Solo automatic pet door with patio insert

We've been wanting to get a pet door for Kushi, so she could go out to potty by herself. We wanted the door to be automatic so Kushi would be allowed to go in and out but the cats would be prevented from going out. But there are not many options for reliable, automatic doors that have patio inserts. After reading reviews on quality and reliability and after months of opening the door for Kushi, we decided the best door was the Solo automatic pet door. But with the patio insert option and the $100 tax and shipping, the total cost was a whopping $800.

So we waited. We would let Kushi out about every 3-4 hours, but she did not know how to let us know when she needed to go outside, so we were afraid to leave her alone longer than that. Because of this, we would always schedule our outings based upon Kushi's potty schedule, which was a drag. We also had to crate her every night.

We decided to get a door chime so that Kushi could let us know when she wanted to go outside (to be reviewed in another post). The problem with the door chime, though, is that we could not train her to use the chime to indicate when she wanted to go outside. She never made the connection with the sequence of pushing the button->hearing the chime->human letting her outside. After months of this, we finally decided to bite the bullet and buy the door.

There are several door sizes available, and we got the smallest configuration with the patio insert option. The door arrived very quickly, within several days. Installation was easy, but the patio insert did not fill out the whole sliding door track, meaning it would wobble back and forth within the track. We ended up using the styrofoam packing blocks that came in the shipping box as shims to fill in the gaps, which ended up working well. The patio insert option comes with foam weatherproofing tape to help seal the gap between the sliding door and the insert, but either the door or the insert is not perfectly straight, because there is a slight gap in the middle of the door. Next trip to Home Depot, we'll look for something better to seal the gap.

The pet door, newly installed in the patio door. Tigger is busy investigating. Too bad the black insert doesn't match our white patio door coloring.

A closeup of the door. The sliding door is some sort of shaded but transparent plastic.

Once you plug the door into an outlet, the door will start working immediately. The system uses a magnet to trigger the opening of the door. Since the sensor is just a magnet, you don't have to worry about any batteries. The major drawback to this method, though, is that any moving metal within range, such as a motor or a sliding door, will trigger the door to open. So whenever we opened the patio door, it would trigger the pet door. This side effect, though, is just an annoyance.

The red magnet sensor is small and unobtrusive, about half the size of a sugar cube. Kushi is looking at me miffed because she just got a dreaded bath.

In the beginning, the door sometimes seemed to get stuck or sluggish when trying to slide back down to close. If you open up the door panel, there are two controls: one for adjusting the distance at which the sensor triggers the door and one for adjusting the length of time the door is open. To prevent the cats from following Kushi out the door, I adjusted the controls to shorten the trigger distance to within 6 inches of the door and for the door to remain open for about 1 second. After adjusting the controls, the sliding became smooth and the door no longer became sluggish/stuck.

The big test came when we put the magnet onto Kushi's collar and started her training. At first, she was a little frightened when the door opened. We lured her with treats to walk through the door. Once she did this a couple times, we would throw the treats through the door, encouraging her to go through the door to retrieve the treat. After we repeated this several times, throwing the treats in and out, she quickly got the idea. This took just a couple minutes.

Later in the afternoon, we saw her go up to the door. The door slid open, and she walked outside. Holding our breaths, we watched her as she went potty and calmly walked back inside through the door. Yes! That was the first time she went potty without us. Kushi loves the door and now uses it regularly. After a couple days, we stopped crating her, and she is now allowed free reign of the house.
It's only been a week, but the door has been operating consistently and smoothly. Time will tell as to its reliability. So, except for the cost, both humans and animal are happy with the door.