A complete kit for a pair of swing gates — two Ditec PWR35 operators, the LCU30 control box and two remotes, all from the same Italian house that has built entrance automation since 1974. One brand from motor to remote, nothing improvised, and a gate that closes behind you every single time.
24 V DC electromechanical rams with mechanical stops built in, one per leaf
The brain — digital display programming and the radio receiver already fitted
Two-channel rolling-code handsets, paired and ready out of the box
The sequence is the same every time you come home. Stop short, headlights on the gate, out of the car, unlatch it in the dark or the rain, back in, drive through, out again, close it. Some nights you are doing that with shopping in the boot and kids in the back — and that is why almost everybody quietly stops closing it. Which is the part that actually matters, because a gate left open is not security, it is a fence with a hole in it. The dog knows it too. Automated, the gate is shut behind you every single time without anyone thinking about it, and you never get out of the car again.
Nearly every horror story about an automated gate traces back to the same thing: an operator that was never sized for the leaf it was asked to move. It strains, it runs hot, it chews its gears, and in a few years it stops. This is not the light-duty end of the market. Each ram takes a leaf up to 3.5 m wide, or a shorter leaf up to 600 kg, which comfortably covers a pair of hot-dip galvanised steel gates on a normal driveway — with a rated life of 300,000 cycles, or decades of ordinary use. It is also irreversible, meaning the gate stays exactly where the motor left it. Nobody pushes it open by hand, and on most installations you will not need a separate electric lock to hold it shut.
Ditec has been doing one thing in Italy since 1974 — automating entrances — starting out as Novotecnica before the brands came together under the Ditec name in the mid-nineties. The PWR data sheet still carries an Origgio address, half an hour north of Milan. Half a century in a single discipline is not a marketing line, and you can hear where it went. Cheap kits open and close. This one lets you shape the movement, so the leaves swing away, slow as they come back in, and settle into the closed position instead of clattering into their stop. That is the whole difference between a gate that sounds expensive and one that sounds cheap. The control box is also watching the load the entire time, so if the gate meets a car, a bin or a person it feels it within half a second and stops or reverses.
There is a pedestrian setting that opens one leaf on its own, so putting the bins out or walking the dog does not mean swinging the whole driveway open. The control box is built to take a back-up battery, which means a blackout is not the night you learn how to wind a gate open by hand. Two remotes come in the box, good for about 100 m and running on a coin cell that lasts a couple of years. And the system takes more whenever you want it — a keypad on the pier so the kids and the trades get a four-digit code instead of a $90 handset, safety photocells across the opening, an aerial if the drive is long. All of it the same brand, so there is one set of manuals and one place to look in five years when something needs changing.
Measure each leaf before you commit: width and weight both matter, and the further out the weight sits, the less the operator will carry. You need room behind the hinge line for a 970 mm ram to sit back against the pier, sound hinges that let the gate swing freely by hand, and a driveway grade no steeper than about 10%. The kit covers the gate, the brain and the remotes — safety photocells are not included and are strongly recommended on any powered gate, along with an aerial if the drive is long and a back-up battery if blackouts bother you. The operators are low-voltage 24 V, but the control box is fed from 230 V mains, so that final connection is a licensed electrician's job.
Take it in two halves and it is very manageable. The gate half is yours: mark and fix the rear brackets to the piers using the pre-drilled plates — the optional PWRMI mounting tool has a spirit level built in so you set both heights in one pass — then bolt the front brackets to the leaves, drop the rams on, and set the mechanical stops so each leaf lands exactly where you want it open and closed. Run the low-voltage cable back to the control box in conduit. The electrical half is your electrician's: they bring the 230 V supply into the LCU30 and terminate it, which is an hour of their time. From there you finish the job yourself at the display — choose PWR35 from the menu, run the self-learning cycle so the panel learns the travel, then tune the acceleration, slowdown and approach speed until it moves the way you want, and pair the two remotes. Ditec cut the mechanical install time on this range by around 60% over the models before it, so most people have the gate moving on day one and spend day two making it feel right.