Several years ago, we installed a cat door into our garage door. It worked great at providing our cats the freedom to come and go and provided an instant refuge from rain or the neighborhood dog.

Everything went fine until a year ago when two unwanted guests took advantage of the door to gain access to the garage. One was a cat who lived down the street and probably just followed our cats into the garage.

The other was the real problem - a raccoon. Or, at least I suspect it was a raccoon from its behavior of tearing open the cat food container and then placing the cat food into the cat’s water bowl. Whatever it was, we needed to make a change.

So, we got a magnetic cat door in place of the plain flap door we had initially installed. We originally looked at both the magnetic and the electronic cat doors. We decided on the magnetic type door because of potential down time due to low batteries or loss of electricity in the electronic doors.

The Multi-Magnetic System door has a 6 inch by 6 ¾ inch opening which was large enough for our weight-challenged kittie. The door comes in white, grey or dark bronze and is available at pet stores such as America’s Pet Store. 

The way the door works is that you attach a small magnet to the pet’s collar. This magnet activates the Multi-Magnets that open the latch to allow entry. Once the pet has entered the system will automatically close the latch. It closes quickly enough that the neighbor cat was not able to follow ours into the garage.

The only challenge we faced at installation time was that the door was designed for a thicker door than our garage, like a wooden external door. However, our handyman was able to gerry-rig support sufficient to hold the pet door securely.

The second challenge was the tendency for one of our two cats to lose his collar attachment. After purchasing several replacements, we hit upon a new strategy - a cat halter. The cat halter is more secure than a cat collar and we have not lost an attachment since we began using it.

Magnetic Cat Door

Posted by Barbara.