Has anyone purchased a door from cooptender.com?

[lynnehd]

I am the one who wrote that review. As a business owner myself, I tend to be more patient and forgiving as I realize things do come up. It was after months of a complete circus and everything malfunctioning that possibly could that we finally gave up...believe me, the last thing I wanted to do was give up after we had the chicken run made to specifically accommodate THAT door and invested/wasted so much time in trying to get it to work. The guy even jerked us around with the Paypal dispute, wasting more of our time and waiting til the very last day to answer. His only rebuttal to Paypal was "all sales final, we don't accept returns". This is not the kind of company I would ever want to work with or would ever recommend to anyone else.

I sincerely hope it works out for the people who already invested. If you made your purchase through PayPal, you do have a period of time to figure it out....I believe it's 120 days. I would not recommend waiting one day later to address any problems because, based on my experience, you're out of luck. For us it came down to, if this much has gone wrong while we do have recourse, what will happen when we don't?

That's a terrible shame. And so unnecessary! How disappointing for you.

 

[MaraC]

Well, it has been about a month now and the door opens and closes dawn and dusk, everyone is in with plenty of spare time and that is adjustable if needed. I did have a bit of trouble a few days around the Christmas full moon so the light value and timing needed to be changed once the was adjusted it is fine again. I will need to check that come the next super moon. Love the way you can see the light values at any given time in order to figure that out and make adjustments from the app. So now that the colder weather is here I hooked up a heater if we have severe weather it will be ready to go.
Hooked up a light in order to extend light time but I am not sure if this will work for me. The accessory module can control the light manually or according to light value which would mean it would automatically go on at night and stay on for the length of time I would choose. I would prefer for it to go on in the morning so I may have to use a timer for that.
While I am testing all of these items out I will probably order coop cameras and ventilation fans so I will be set for the summer. I wanted to wait but considering that this is such a new item I probably should be testing all the features.
One thing for sure, I LOVE the wifi and its features. If considering the wifi you should havea good internet connection, I have gone offline but the door continues to work as it should.

 

[lynnehd]

Well, it has been about a month now and the door opens and closes dawn and dusk, everyone is in with plenty of spare time and that is adjustable if needed. I did have a bit of trouble a few days around the Christmas full moon so the light value and timing needed to be changed once the was adjusted it is fine again. I will need to check that come the next super moon. Love the way you can see the light values at any given time in order to figure that out and make adjustments from the app. So now that the colder weather is here I hooked up a heater if we have severe weather it will be ready to go.
Hooked up a light in order to extend light time but I am not sure if this will work for me. The accessory module can control the light manually or according to light value which would mean it would automatically go on at night and stay on for the length of time I would choose. I would prefer for it to go on in the morning so I may have to use a timer for that.
While I am testing all of these items out I will probably order coop cameras and ventilation fans so I will be set for the summer. I wanted to wait but considering that this is such a new item I probably should be testing all the features.
One thing for sure, I LOVE the wifi and its features. If considering the wifi you should havea good internet connection, I have gone offline but the door continues to work as it should.

Good news! The wifi monitoring is a nice touch.

(Perhaps it's better in a separate thread or pm, but I would love to hear which coop camera and ventilation fan you decide to get. Looking at both of those myself.)

 

[KentE2]

I too seem to be on about the same schedule as others. I was looking to add the final piece to my new coop this fall and the chicken door was the one thing that I was struggling with. I found 5 or so doors on the market and when we sat down and did the evaluation we decided on the CoopTender. I like the Ben Franklin way of decisions... list the positives then the negatives, count them up and the decision is easy. Anyway, we ordered it and got the note that the build process would start right away, that was a little bit of an eye opener. Then I did a little closer examination and see that they are a fairly small company, and I can't blame them for not wanting to hold inventory. So no big deal... We waited and it showed up, I really don't know if it was a little long or not but what ever. Oh, I do have to say that knowing that I wanted the WiFi module, I made sure that I could stand in the Coop and have good WiFi signal on my cell phone just to be sure it would work. It installed very quickly 20 minutes total to read the manual, program the WiFi, Cut the opening and screw in the door and before I knew it we had a working coop door. The girls seem to get used to the little ladder and the door pretty quickly. It has been installed for over a month and we are in Minnesota so we have had some very cold temps lately, sub 0 F. I have not had any issues really, in fact the closest thing I had to a problem was, in attempting to configure my new WiFi cameras via my iPhone and the interface was not working properly. I called in a ticket and received a call from the tech. He was very pleasant and said "Oh I see what the issue is, I will get that submitted right away and we can have that fixed yet today. I will send you an email confirming it is fixed so you can test it". Sure enough, I got the email that night and the issue was fixed. I should have tried on the PC and it would have worked but, I really do most everything from the phone now a days, I am kind of a tech head and understand the electronics, mechanical components and even the construction so it all makes sense to me.

I like what I see so far and as with anything else, I will have to wait and see how well it continues to work. As of now I could not be happier. I am even getting used to when out with friends or family for some kind of gathering and I get a text from the coop to tell me that the girls are all safe and going to sleep.... They look at me pretty funny and then I explain the whole thing... It ends up just another chapter in my chicken saga.

Some one asked for recommendations on what was added, I went with their recommendations for cameras when we bought. I see that they also list heaters, lights an more that they say work with the system. I think I am going to get one of the accessory modules for lights but most likely not a heater. They are doing great so far, minor frost bite on the larger combs is all we have seen.

 

[cooptender]

Greetings fellow chicken lovers.

We are chicken (and duck) lovers! We have our Coop Tender doors on our chicken coops for over a year now and they are still operating

I would like to take this opportunity mention out that we introduced our door, Coop Tender in lat 2014. After introduction, we experienced relatively high defect rates (in the 10% range). Many defects were incurred by the shipping process, which we have managed to resolve by implementing a number of changes to how the product is packed.

Throughout 2015, we quickly reacted to defect reports by reviewing and updating door designs, electronics designs as well as firmware code updates. You can read about the design and product enhancements which we have incorporated into our product on our blog post from December of 2015, “New and Improved Automatic Chicken Coop Door” which may be located on our website via the “Latest News” link at the bottom of our site, in case the following URL does not post: https://cooptender.com/blogs/news/80878726-new-and-improved-automatic-chicken-coop-door

Our in-house production capacity quickly became overloaded due to the popularity of our door. We also encountered delivery delays on some of the over 200 parts which go into a Coop Tender door.

We contracted with a circuit board manufacturer in Texas for our electronics assembly towards the end of 2015. It was important to us to use a U.S. based service provider to ensure high quality electronics production of our chicken coop doors. This helped to increase quality, reduce defect rates and reduce the amount of time necessary to build each door (from 7 hours to about 5).

We still custom manufacture and assemble each door here in western Pennsylvania with a very limited staff. We don’t make very much profit on each door. Our goal is to provide our chicken coop door at a competitive price so that our customers can reap the benefits of advanced technology.

We did make some mistakes along the way. We have done all that we can to learn from those mistakes and always do our best to ensure that our customers are happy.

I hope that more customers post their experiences with our door as there are hundreds of customers in the U.S., Canada and Europe who are very happy with their Coop Tender doors and Internet accessories.

Thanks for listening.

Kind Regards,

Jim Miller - Coop Tender Owner

 

[MaraC]

Good news! The wifi monitoring is a nice touch.

(Perhaps it's better in a separate thread or pm, but I would love to hear which coop camera and ventilation fan you decide to get. Looking at both of those myself.)

 

[MaraC]

Finally got around to ordering a fan because I figure eventually the weather will be warming up Here is a link to the fan I wound up with.
http://www.amazon.com/AC-Infinity-A...&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00
Still trying to figure out what cameras would be easy for me to install.

 

[cooptender]

Finally got around to ordering a fan because I figure eventually the weather will be warming up

Here is a link to the fan I wound up with.
http://www.amazon.com/AC-Infinity-A...&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00
Still trying to figure out what cameras would be easy for me to install.

That fan will not work with our Chicken Coop Door Accessory and Heat Control Module since it is powered by 115V AC. The Accessory Control Module controls 12 Volt DC lighting and ventilation. Heat is controlled by standard AC (115V) power. The Accessory Control Module product page on our website provides some suggestions for lights, vent fans and heaters which may be used and are available for purchase on Amazon.

 

[MaraC]

That fan will not work with our Chicken Coop Door Accessory and Heat Control Module since it is powered by 115V AC.  The Accessory Control Module controls 12 Volt DC lighting and ventilation.  Heat is controlled by standard AC (115V) power.  The Accessory Control Module product page on our website provides some suggestions for lights, vent fans and heaters which may be used and are available for purchase on Amazon.

 

[MaraC]

Ok. Thank you. I'll use it as an extra. I had tried to get one of the example but at the time it was not available. Will check again.