STKR Garage Parking Sensor Review
A Must Have For Every Garage
Retail Price: $39.99
How It Works
I’ve said it time and time again, the best consumer gadgets are often the simple things that make everyday tasks for human life simpler. Whether that be improving convenience or even removing the human aspect out of a task for safety reasons, technology’s role in society is ever evolving.
Here’s a very simple tool that I literally use multiple times a day that once I got it set up in my garage, I don’t ever think about it. The STKR parking sensor is a simple little octagon shaped light connected through a cable to an ultrasonic, range-finding sensor. It’ll tell you when to move and when to stop. That’s all it does, yet this is probably the best piece of technology I’ve ever purchased.
Back when I was a kid, my Grandparents would hang a stray ball pit ball in their garage that they had “borrowed” from the play area at McDonald’s. I used to love smacking that ball around like it was a tetherball. They of course didn’t install that little eyesore for sport as like many aging practical Americans back in the day, parking in their garage was becoming more difficult with their declining eyesight and motor skills. The dangling ball was a way for them to find a way to notify their instincts to stop moving the car forward before they would inevitably hit something in the garage. For the most part it worked, but I would find my grandfather constantly reapplying the hook into the ceiling over time or replacing the ball as it somehow got loose from contact with the windshield.
Two Ways to Power
The sensor takes either AA batteries or a direct plug into a wall outlet
Now that I’m also a homeowner and have a narrow garage space to park my big SUV in, I too understand the annoyances and difficulties of parking a car into a garage. However, thanks to consumerism, there’s a much safer and effective way of gauging how close your car is to something rather than hanging a ball on the ceiling. This simple to install gadget just tapes onto a surface and is powered by four AA batteries if there isn’t a wall plug nearby that can accommodate the Micro-USB port. If it's strictly operating off of the batteries, I’d say the sensor is good for about half a year before needing a fresh set with moderate reliance on the unit. It might be more or less depending on how often you back in and out of the garage, but during the work week, I think most people will see this sensor working only a couple of times throughout the day.
The initial calibration process is as simple as a press of a button. What the sensor does is it measures the distance you want the unit to notify it senses a mass approaching. The distance it reads can be set and can range from a minimum of 6 inches to a maximum of 6 ft. In my case, I have the light and sensor taped onto a shoe cabinet and have the distance to alert me to stop programmed for about 2 to 3 feet away. This gives me enough room to open the cabinet door while parking the car deep enough to clear the garage door closing from behind.
When the sensor picks up a pulse, it will emit one of three colors through the light fixture: green, yellow, red. Like the traffic lights we obey, green means approach and that the distance to the destination is still far off, yellow means to slow down as the car begins nearing the sensor, and red means the car is in the correct programmed spot and needs to come to a full stop. The ultra-sonic pulses that the sensor sends out to read the distance is extremely accurate from my use of the product. It’s been exact every single time I’ve approached it. I’m not exaggerating that I’ve pulled in and out of my garage likely hundreds if not thousands of times and the sensor has always parked me in the exact location every single time without fail. I was a bit hesitant to fully trust the light when I first began using it as I was worried it would relay the stop command too late and I would crash into the closet, but that has not been the case at all. I’ve since fully invested my trust into this garage parking sensor and I genuinely have no anxiety about parking my car into the garage anymore. It truly does make it so simple.
final thoughts
The sensor’s light illuminated in the dark
The last additional benefit this little gadget does is provide a floor lamp to illuminate directly below it when the lights in the garage are off. It’s not powerful enough to illuminate the room, but it's plenty enough to give me a visual clarity to not step and trip on a shoe.
Another nice thing about this is that it can be removed and relocated anywhere you want to since it’s not hard-mounted. I’ve only seen my unit collapse and fall off of the door that I taped it to once. I think a mixture of the heat in the garage with the opening and closing of the shoe closet door contributed to the tape losing efficacy. That’s really the only downside I’ve experienced using the STKR garage parking sensor. This is an extremely beneficial gadget that is inexpensive and worth every dollar to me.
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