[campbellcj]

We've had several home security / alarm / dog kinds of threads lately, so here's another twist.

I had a freak incident today where my wife and I, as well as the housekeeper and our son, all left the house around 8am simultaneously, in 2 different cars.

When I got home tonight -- 11 hours later -- the garage door was half-open.

My theory is that I hit the garage 'close' button, since I pulled out first, and then a few seconds after my wife must've hit the button in her car also, which instead of closing the door, of course reversed it or stopped it. The timing today was highly unsual as we've never pulled out of the driveway almost simultaneously before. The other possibility is that some critter or debris triggered the safety stop beam.

Anyway...there is quite a bit of stuff in the garage that, needless to say, I REALLY would not like to lose. Plus, the inner house door was open too (often I lock it just out of paranoia, but not this am).

Thankfully nothing was taken, which makes me feel a little less paranoid about our near-L.A. neighborhood, but I was wondering if anybody's tried those timer-based automatic garage door closing things I recall seeing in a catalog? Hopefully there would be a simple override for cases when you deliberately want to keep the door open?

Sorry for rambling...this kinda freaked me out as my parents just got burglarized 2-3 weeks ago...