Re-Seating the Flap Seal
Help! My flap has come out!
Are you experiencing an issue with your flap seal (outer U-shaped black piece) coming loose, partially out, or completely out as shown below?
If so, good news! This can be fixed permanently and fairly easily.
Why did this happen?
RANGER dog and cat doors were designed with safety in mind. The flap system has an engineered safety system that allows the flap seal to pull loose under extreme conditions. In the scenario where a dog or a child somehow gets tangled up in the flap system, the door is designed to "give" before any injuries could occur.
If this happened in the first month or so of owning your pet door, it's likely that your dog actually did get a little tangled up in the door. This can happen as dogs are getting used to going in and out, oftentimes when they start going out and then reverse course. This is typically a one-off event.
There are other ways this can happen, too. If a dog is playing "tug of war" with the flap seal, it can eventually be pulled out. If ground level on the exterior side is lower than floor level on the interior side, sometimes dogs will use the chew guard (hard plastic bottom piece on the flap seal) as a step to get back up and in. If you have more than one dog (especially if they're big and high-energy), sometimes they will try to go through together or opposite ways at the same time.
How do I fix this?
Fortunately, this is fairly easy to fix.
If your instinct was to shove the flap seal back up there, you were 90% correct. There is a little trick to making this work correctly, though.
Step 1 - Pop the Screw Cap Covers
On the exterior side, there are black "dots" on the top of the clamp. These are screw cap covers. You need to get underneath the far left and/or far right one, and "pop" it open. This will reveal a Phillips head screw.
Step 2 - Loosen Screws
Back the Phillips head screws out about halfway. This loosens the pressure on the hard plastic clamp, which will allow proper re-seating of the flap seal.
Step 3 - Re-seat Flap Seal
Slide the flap seal back into place under the clamp.
The flap seal goes up further than you might think. To properly re-seat the flap seal, the top of the flap seal leg should go to the very top of the clamp, overlapping the weatherstrip foam at the top about halfway.Step 4 - Check Magnetic Alignment
Perfect magnetic alignment is critical to the performance of the airtight seal. You're going to want to check to make sure the flap seal magnets are perfectly aligned with the flap magnets (bottom, left, and right) and with the frame magnets (bottom, left, and right). Tweak the alignment until it's prefect. This is tedious, but not terribly difficult.
Step 4 - Retighten Screws
Once the flap seal is perfectly positioned, it's time to crank the screws back down. Factory torque is 27 in-lbs, which is really, really tight. We recommend using a t-handled screwdriver to achieve this level of tightness. If using an electric screwgun, be careful not to strip the screw (contact us if that happens).
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