Rear view mirror house symbol buttons?

Those are the HomeLink buttons to program your garage door openers, etc. into. Keeps the visor clean! (no controllers clipped there) Your manual will tell you how to program them.

 

You can also program security gates or house codes for wireless light, etc., if you've got them. That doesn't make much sense if you don't have them but if you do, you know what I mean.

Pretty cool, huh?

 

Being an “AM†(safety model), my car does not have this feature (nor an unnecessary, for here in the Sacramento area, garage to use it on) . . . but I am curious . . . Is the Homelink feature disabled when the car is off?

Garage door openers are an easy way for burglars to gain access to your garage and, if attached, house. (But of course I would expect the Prii to have priority for garage parking space, making this scenario moot!)

 

The garage opener is not disabled when the car is off.

 

You can also go to www.homelink.com to get complete instructions on how to program the system.

It's pretty easy and can do more than just open doors...it can be setup to turn on lights and all sorts of neat stuff if you like.

 

I never considered that! Probably few did, as I am sure people keep their remotes in their car. But if you are opening a garage door with an opener, you are probably putting the car in there.

 

If they break into the car they're going to set off the alarm...then have to get in the garage and finally break into the house after that. All possible, but with less noise they could probably just use a device that opens most garage doors (thieves have them) and let themselves in. The newer door opening systems with rolling codes are much more secure.

I would also hope that anyone who is worried about security wouldn't leave the door between their house and garage unlocked in hopes that the garage door is secure enough.

 

Hmmm, you have a garage with a garage door opener, but leave the car parked outside? I suppose it happens, I've noticed a lot of folks pack their garages to the rafters with junk.

I put Chamberlain garage door openers on the detached garage at my hobby farm. The inside control, which I put next to the light switch at the entry door to the garage, has a "Lock" button.

You press and hold Lock for 5 secs, and the LED's on the door sensor begin rapid blinking. This indicates the door opener will reject ANY remote request to open or close.

I've tried this and it works. You Lock the opener, and when you press the Homelink button, all that happens is the courtesy light in the opener flashes several times. So if you have an attached garage, this is a good security feature.

Otherwise, if you can't disable remote access for the opener, this is a valid security concern. Some folks rig up a light switch at the entry door to turn power off the the opener for the night.

 

Where I live most people don't park their cars in their garage. The garage is usually used as another room of the house.

 

Wide doors have a much bigger problem with this than the single-stall doors. If the door alignment or the tension pulley's are off at all, the door will close poorly or crooked, and will stop before bottom.

Once you verify the floor is perfectly level and the door is closing level, you can use the adjustment potentiometer on the opener to make it close a bit more. This requires patience as you should only turn the adjusting screw one click at a time.

You also want one of those thicker door seals, around an inch thick, for the door. It's properly compressed at around half an inch.

 

Look in the owner's manual.

Door openers that I have seen have a close stop position setscrew, and open stop position setscrew, an opening jam sensitivity, a closing jam sensitivity, and many have photo (infared?) sensors at the bottom opening of doorway.

The setscrews move a contact that tells the opener when it has reached the intended end of its travel, and the jam sensitivity controls determine how much slowing of the gears it should alow before detecting a jam.

Driver window works a similar way, but I believe it counts pulses from the photo-optic gear to determine end of travel, since it is a known travel distance.

 

If the door is only two years old, it must have obstacle detection, which is the photocell near the floor. This way, if a child should happen to wander in or out while the door is closing, it will stop and change direction.

If it's a Chamberlain door, and you've lost the manual (Or the builder never gave you one), you can download it from their web site.

 

I tried programming mine a few weeks back and had no luck. Does anyone know if there are certain brands, etc that don't work? Could someone dumb it down more than the manual for me? I'd appreciate it, thanks.

 

It is an absolute pain the arse, it took me better than an hour to program just one of two remotes.

I had to try holding the thing at different positons and distances away from the Homelink button on the rear view mirror to get it right.

Read and reread the instructions. Get a ladder and look very closely at the door opener. Find the paperwork for it. Find out if it is the rolling code kind.

Make sure the car homelink is postioned in the very front of the door, so it has the strongest possible link.

Its a pain.

 

Some of us have a 1 car garage and 2 cars (OK, it IS packed with junk so both cars are outside now). The only way to get in the garage is through the house or with the garage door opener. Don't really want to go stomping through the house with dirty shoes to open the garage door to get something you need in the front, (topic alert!) like the air pump for the Prius tires.