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A Lot Smarter Than a Simple Photocell!
If you have ever owned a light-activated yard lamp, you might wonder whether a chicken door using light-sensing would have the same frustrating quirks. Will dark storm clouds accidentally shut the door in the middle of the day? What if your coop sits under a canopy of trees, or what if your chicken run has an opaque cover? And what about yard lights at night, will they trick the door into staying open? What about moon light or Head Lamps?
These are smart questions, and they are exactly the kind of problems we set out to solve for deer feeders decades ago. The foundation for ADOR technology goes back to the 1990s, when Rod developed the Smart Timer (TM) for Kenco Deer Feeders and was awarded US Patent US5808294A — listing Rodney H. Neumann as inventor. While that patent has since expired, it represents the depth of real, documented engineering experience that underlies every ADOR product.
The ADOR door uses this advanced daylight-sensing technology that handles all of these real-world conditions reliably — no clock timer required. And that matters more than it might seem. A clock-based timer has to be manually adjusted every week or two as sunrise and sunset shift with the seasons. The whole point of an automatic chicken door is to free you from that kind of routine maintenance. ADOR takes care of it for you, automatically, every single day.
One of the key innovations was the decision to use infrared (IR) sensors rather than the conventional Cadmium Sulfide (CdS) visible light sensors common in the industry at the time. Rod learned that Infrared sensing is far more responsive to natural daylight and far less susceptible to interference from artificial lighting. Soon, the deer feeder industry, and much later, other manufacturers of chicken doors, followed suit and made the same change. That kind of industry-wide adoption speaks for itself.
At ADOR, we did not follow the industry. We led it.