Gate automation is one of the easiest things to buy badly, because everything looks identical once it is installed and the differences only surface months later — usually at night, usually in the rain. Ask these questions before you pay a deposit.
Is the motor sized to the gate you actually have?
Motors are rated by leaf weight and leaf width, and both matter. A heavy wrought-iron sliding gate and a light aluminium one of the same width need different hardware, and a motor running permanently near its limit will fail early and take your patience with it.
Ask for the weight and width the quoted motor is rated for, and check it against your gate. If the installer has not measured or weighed anything, they are picking from habit.
Where are the safety devices?
A powered gate is a heavy machine that moves where children and cars are. Photocell beams across the opening stop the gate when the path is broken; obstruction detection reverses it when it meets resistance; a flashing lamp warns that it is about to move.
These are not upsells. If a quote does not mention photocells, that is the first thing to query, and the answer will tell you a great deal about the rest of the installation.
What happens when the power is out?
In Lagos this is not an edge case, it is Tuesday. There are two separate answers you need: battery backup so the gate keeps operating through an outage, and a manual release so you can open it by hand when the battery is flat too.
Ask to be shown the manual release and to operate it yourself at handover. A release key that lives in the installer's van is not a release.
For smart locks, ask the unglamorous questions
The failure modes are predictable, so check them deliberately:
- What happens when the batteries die — is there a physical key override or external power contact?
- Does it still unlock if the Wi-Fi or the vendor cloud is down?
- How many users and codes can it hold, and can access be revoked individually?
- Is the mechanical lock body itself any good, or is a weak latch hiding behind a nice app?
- Who holds the administrator account after the installer leaves?
Get the warranty and the handover in writing
Establish what is covered, for how long, and by whom — the manufacturer, the importer or the installer. Parts and labour are often different periods, and "one year warranty" without that detail means very little.
At handover you should receive the documents in your name, the remotes and their pairing instructions, the manual release key, and a demonstration of the safety devices actually working. If any of that is missing, the job is not finished.
Sized motor, photocells, battery backup, manual release, documented warranty. Five checks, all of them answerable before you pay a deposit, and together they separate an installation that lasts a decade from one you will be arguing about by next rainy season.
