What's new in the Garmin Bark Limiter?
Autorise Stimulation -- Garmin has added a setting to the BarkLimiter that allows the unit to automatically increase stimulation levels as your dog barks to find the correct level. Unlike direct set stimulation levels, the Autorise feature uses 18 levels of stimulation. This allows the unit to ramp up very quickly to stop rapid barking and to get to the right level fast.
The advantage of an autorise feature is that the unit can deal with high distraction situations that need higher levels and then after the barking is over the level will drop. The next time a lower distraction situation comes up, the unit starts low so that your dog isn't over corrected.
I have had great success with this type of feature in other brands of bark collars and I am glad to see it in the Bark Limiter. The majority of my dogs work fine in an autorise mode but I have a few that don't. Some dogs are just really driven to bark and they require a high correction level the first time they bark and everytime after that. These dogs will not do well on an autorise bark collar and will require a high direct set level.
The downside of autorise is that you are going to have some barking. This mode might not be what your particular barking issue needs and you might be better off with a direct set level.
Vibration Settings -- In Vibration mode, instead of correcting the dog with static stimulation when he barks, the collar will vibrate. There is no electric stimulation at all. It is not a warning or a precursor to stimulation, it is only vibration.
I can't say it won't stop a dog from barking but I'll be real surprised if it does, especially over time. Some dogs may find vibration to be startling at first, but once your dog figures out that there is no downside to it, you will need to move to a mode that has a stimulation correction.
Keep in mind that if you have used vibration on a remote training collar to communicate with your dog you will be making a mistake to try and use vibration with your bark collar.
Coin Slot Dial -- This is a very simple way to operate the collar and it's easy to tell what level you are on. The down side is that you do not want a dial that is easy to turn. If it's easy to turn then there is a chance that the level could get changed while the collar is on the dog.
Garmin has made this dial stiff. This makes it hard to turn by hand but there is little chance it will change levels by accident. To make it easier to use, there is a "coin slot" in the dial that lets you use a penny, dime or quarter to turn the dial. You can also use a flat head screw driver or any other flat tool.
I am not a big fan of external dials. We have several products that use them and I don't like them. There are a couple of things about the Bark Limiter that make the dial an improvement over a button, but I'm still not a fan. When we have trouble with older versions of the Bark Limiter, the majority of the time it was an on/off button issue. Every time you changed anything on the old Bark Limiter you used the on/off button. Once it failed you were done. The dial should fix that. Also, changing levels on the old Bark Limiter was a pain. You had to scroll through all 5 levels to lower the stimulation. It was hard to explain and it took time. The dial fixes that.
Updated Bark Odometer -- Garmin has made a needed change to the "Bark Odometer" on this version. Instead of flashing green once for every time the dog is corrected, you get red flashes for every 10 correction and then green flashes for the ones. For example, if you get 2 red flashes and 5 green flashes, your dog was corrected 25 times. (You may need to turn that level up!)
Integrated Contact Points -- The Bark Limiter no longer comes with short and long contact points. The new integrated contact points are designed to work with long and short haired coats. This is a new trend in bark collars and we have not seen many issues with not being able to get good skin contact, but some dogs will require longer probes. If that is the case with your dog, you will need to try another brand.
"Good Barks"
If you look around at other sites on the internet that also sell the Garmin Bark Limiter, you will find text that talks about this unit being able to "recognize qualitative differences in barking." These websites claim that the Bark Limiter can tell the difference between "obsessive or nuisance barking" and ignore "good" barking. This is not true. Garmin originally intended to make this concept part of the design of the new Bark Limiter but were unable to do so.
While this is a feature that many folks would love to have in a bark collar, the Bark Limiter can't do this. The reason these websites claim that the product will do this is because Garmin accidentally included this text on its website and several distributors sent the info out to their dealers.
The Bark Limiter can not tell the difference between "good" barking and "bad" barking. Anyone that tells you it can does not know what they are talking about.
What the Bark Limiter does do is differentiate between barking and other vocalizations. This is pretty typical in bark collars today. We find that many sounds that a dog makes will not be seen as "barks" by the unit. This is a good thing, but sometimes we have dogs that learn how to make sounds that the unit will not correct.
Transcript from Steve's Video:
Today we're going to take a look at the Garmin Bark Limiter products. These are bark collars made by Garmin based off of the Tri-Tronics design that we've had the last 10 or 12 years.
Rechargeable technology nowadays is pretty good. You are not going to have to charge this really that often. Once a week would be plenty for most folks. You may be able to get away with even going out longer than that. It really depends on how much your dog barks.
10 years ago I hated rechargeable bark collars because they had so much downtime. You had to charge them every day. You'd have these situations where you needed your bark collar but it was out of battery. Nowadays it's just not that common. The technology is really good.
The dial has N, which is a neutral position. It cuts the collar off. Then you have V, which V is a vibration only mode. When the dog bark it gives a vibration. There is no electrical stimulation involved whatsoever. It's strictly vibration when he barks. The A is a rising stimulation. The way this bark collar works, when the dog barks it gives a correction at the lowest level. When he barks again it gives another correction. If he continues to bark, the stimulation increases until you get to a level where the dog stops barking.
I like rising stimulation in bark collars. It allows the dog to figure out which level is going to work for him. So I'm a big fan of it. Some people don't care for it because a dog that can take a lot of stimulation is going to be able to bark several times before it reaches that level. So a lot of it depends on your situation.
My dogs wear bark collars not so much because of my neighbors, because I live out in the country. They wear bark collars because of me. I don't want to listen to them. So when they are wearing a bark collar, they get a bark or two in. something comes up and they choose to bark once or twice. It's not really that big of a deal to me. I just don't want them to bark constantly. So most of my dogs work in a rising stimulation.
Then you've got direct set levels, which this unit has 1-7. Some dogs just don't work well in a rising stimulation mode and you want to be able to give them an exact level based on what they need. So you've got seven different levels to choose from.
Now, a dial on the outside of the collar can be a problem if it's a free spinning dial. So what Garmin has done is they've made it where you need something to turn the dial. A penny works really good. You can use a screwdriver, anything like that. You can turn it by hand, but it's not easy. And so, they've got a little key slot there. You just take your penny and you set it.
What's nice about this particular collar is that once you figure out what level you want to use, you can actually leave it there the majority of the time.
A couple of features that this collar has, it has a sleep mode. So if your collar is on and it's on the dog, you take it off and you leave it on Level 4 and you set it down, after a short period of time, once it's motionless the collar is going to power down. What that does is conserves battery life. The idea behind it is if your dog is curled up and he's asleep, he's not going to need the bark mode, so it powers down to save battery life.
Well, the same thing is true when you take it off the dog. So if you figure out the level that you want, you set it on that level and you can leave it there pretty much all the time.
If you do that, though, you miss out on one of the features. Garmin has what's called a bark odometer. The system will record the number of times the dog is corrected. And so, if you set it on a 4 and now you want to see how many times your dog barked while you were gone, take it off the dog, turn it back to N. Before it shuts down it's going to blink at you and tell you how many times the dog was corrected.
So if you turn it off and you get no blinks or one or two, then you go, "OK. Good. The 4 is working." If you get 30 then you know your dog has been barking the entire time you were gone. We need to increase the stimulation level.
So it's a pretty neat feature. It's called the bark odometer.
