Slideback- Sliding Door Closer (Heavy Duty Plus) for 8 ft Wide or Tall Doors

We needed a self closing sliding patio door for a pool inspection. Ours is a large, 8' door and new, so I thought I could surely bypass the need for silicone spray. Wrong! The installation went fairly well, but just like previous reviews reported, it did not close the last 6 inches. We cleaned the track, adjusted the speed of the mechanism, and played around with it for a couple of hours. Finally I purchased some silicone spray, sprayed once along the bottom & top tracks, and adjusted to the fastest closing speed. Voila! It works perfectly.

I’m giving this a full 5 stars because I want people to know it works and it works well, since it’s basically the only option on the market right now. But there are a lot of caveats. You need to be at least little handy to get this thing going. You also need silicone lubricant, which it does not come with. Your door also needs to slide easily. It won’t work otherwise. We have a huge trim on our door frame, but we were able to mount the bar on the underside of the trim and it fit great. Very happy with this! I’m not sure that it will completely prevent my husky from opening the door, but it will definitely slow him down.

Edit: after having installed for a few days, maybe baking in the sun or just getting stretched out, it started to close to 3 inches, then it finally started to close all the way. without any assistance or secondary device to assist. The door does not slam closed, which is good for kids, but it makes it more challenging to open overall and it also starts to close immediately upon release, so you have to hold it open as needed (which is good for my situation). Changed to 4 star since it does work, just had to give it time. Original: Our door is super easy to open, can flick it open with your pinky finger (new wheels, aluminum door on a very clean track, not ideal to open so smoothly I might add, but it does). I have 6 kids and a backyard designed with them in mind, with that said, i needed something that would close the sliding glass door automatically since they always leave it open (bugs, rodents, a/c, heat, etc.. whatever the reason need be, want the door closed). It hooked right up, wasn't difficult, mounted with double sided tape as a pre-set before drilling. The pump adds a lot of opening resistance (which we actually liked because it makes it harder for the babies to open), however it fails to fully close the door. it doesn't really even come 'close enough' to closing, or I would deal with it even if it was just cracked open... but as you can see from the video & pictures, there is a good 6 inches worth of it being left open, it's not a gradual close at this point, it will just hang there until we manually close it - which this adds more resistance to closing beyond this point. Test 1: cleaned the track (even more-so than it was), no help Test 2: oiled the track up - no help Test 3: assisted push the door closed - it incrementally closed 1-2 inches until 1in left before resistance required a good 'push to close' Test 4: oiled up the top of the track (can hear some scraping sounds from wobble), no help Test 5: disconnected the pump to ensure I didn't mess it up, pump closes properly without door attached, door closes with flick as normal. Conclusion: I think this may be a good product, but just doesn't work for my application. I am not sure if I will keep it or return it, going to try a double resolve method... using this pump with one of those wire closer things at same time, see if the wire mechanism can give it that extra tug to close, and if so, then it will have been worth it, even if it took 2 separate items. if not, then i will likely return.

If I had kept the slideback I would have had to cut the door trim from on top of my door to install it. I choose not to install the slideback because it would not allow me to open my door all the way.

The door becomes harder to open but the real drawback is that it doesn’t shut all the way and it has a metal on metal sound whenever you open and close the door that’s surprisingly loud! Definitely not worth what I paid…

[Pros]: It works. Everything it says it does, it does it. [Cons]: Probably is better to contract someone to put it for you. I paid someone to install it for me but I quickly found out that not everyone is skilled enough to do the labor. The heavy-duty is hard to open. I'll need a new handle to help me get enough grip. [Notes]: My slider isn't the best quality door. So my experience with the product is probably being interfered with the quality of my door. For example, to open the door I have to use two fingers to squeeze through the lock to get a grip and pull the door open. Meaning, I don't really have a handle to open the door.

I don’t normally write reviews but I have to for this one. I am building a pool and my county requires an auto closer for sliding glass doors if you don’t have a fence. I ordered the heavy duty as I didn’t want any issues. It worked fine for a week and then stopped working. Emailed customer service and they called me 3 minutes later. We went through some troubleshooting and ended up sending me a replacement and fixed the issue in time for my inspection. Do your due diligence. Clean the tracks completely. Dirt and animal hair will slow down your rollers. Replace your rollers if need be (quite easy to do) as old rollers will be rusty and will cause some drag. This isn’t a very strong ram but it will do the job correctly as you ensure your door assembly is in good working condition. The customer service and follow through are top notch.

I got tired of repeating myself to my kids to shut the back door. My husband installed it and it was pretty easy for him to install. He did have to oil it and adjust it. Just depending on how fast you want the door to shut. Definitely happy with the purchase.