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Garage Door Opener
This one might not be for everyone. I got it from the Mazda Miata list and have put it in every car I've owned since. What it does is wire your garage door opener into your headlight high beams. When done, you flash your lights to open the door.
It requires that your remote control uses a 12-volt battery. If yours does not, you can pick up a part at Radio Shack that will reduce 12 volts to whatever your remote requires. |
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Note:
In Canada, the high beams double as daytime running lights so this won't work. A helpful Canadian Element owner let me know that he had done it using the passenger directional signals as a power source and it worked fine. (Thanks, tpookSter) |
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First step is to pretty much rip apart your remote. I bought a spare one first & programmed it in case things didn't go as planned. |
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Then you jump the switch so it is always "on" by soldering a short wire across its terminals. If you can't figure out which terminals to jump, take a piece of wire and your remote out to the garage and do some testing. |
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Then solder a couple of leads onto the battery terminals (won't need a battery anymore). In this example, red = pos and blue/white = neg. |
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Finished remote wrapped in a heavy plastic ready to be installed. |
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The positive (red) wire from the remote gets spliced into the headlight high beam wire (the passenger side headlight is used here). The headlight wire with the white stripe is the one to use. |
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The negative (blue) wire can go to any convenient grounding point - here it is attached to the washer fill mounting screw. |
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Finally, use a wire fastener to position the remote control near the front of the car somewhere where its signal won't be blocked by metal. The plastic front of the Element makes this easy. Total time: about 1.5 hours. |
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