As mentioned in past posts, the main gate at Purgatory has been problematic. Several years ago a tree fell and snapped the line feeding the power pole that serves our gate. That, coupled with the repaving of the driveway, meant the gate needed some serious love to make work again. Later, another bit of same tree fell and while it didn’t snap the line, it did require PG&E to come out and deal with the issue.
Then when we looked inside the panel attached to that meter, we discovered a bird had decided to use it as a nesting site. This caused the breaker for the gate to toast itself.
We just can’t make this stuff up.
In the end, we bit the bullet and used a contractor recommended by a neighbor. Agent Smith is a stickler for tidy wiring and not bodging jobs up, and while the guy didn’t do a bad job, his workmanship wasn’t the best and we’ll continue our search for the perfect gatekeeper. But at least the junction boxes are no longer quite so manky. And as you can see, we were in the midst of redoing the white fencing, but more on that in a future post.
Still, our gate is now functioning again–no more chaining it closed to keep stray livestock out, although the owner of said livestock really changed his ways after the whole “impounded by Animal Control” thing. The issue with most gate systems is either they’re running on technology developed in the 1980s that relies on having a Windows 3.1 machine lying around that you can connect to program the system, or newer tech which just functions as an overlay to emulate the former. Also, single-gate control systems are the outlier as modern systems are setup for large-scale deployments, like for a housing development. We’re still evaluating options, but for now we at least have reliable power to the gate. (We considered moving to solar, but the yearly utility bill for the secondary meter is far cheaper than the cost of converting.)
We will probably set up a WAP and repeater midway back to the main house, which will also allow us to have a security system that is not reliant upon batteries. But that won’t happen for a while yet.