“You left the garage door open, again.”
If you’re anything like me, this is one of those phrases that make your skin crawl.
Hopefully I won’t be hearing it anymore, not from my loving (and patient) wife, nor from my friendly neighbor who’s saved me numerous times over the years! This weekend I finally took some free time to strike this small home improvement project off my to-do list.
We live in a safe city and our neighborhood has an active block watch which encourages neighbors to keep a watchful eye for each other. Still, it only takes a moment of inattention to leave the garage door open and cause unneeded self-inflicted pain. A Hebrew idiom based on the Talmud says “An open slot is an invitation to the thieves.” You don’t need to be Talmud scholar to get that.
It turns out, no matter the age of a house, it never has enough room to store the stuff one accumulates. Whether it’s camping gear, tools, luggage or bulky (and expensive) sports equipment like your bikes, skiing gear and golf club set — a detached garage often becomes a storage facility and a treasure trove for the lucky burglar. If the garage is part of the same structure as your house it can be even worse — it can lead to a break-in.
Four years ago, my last attempt to secure my garage door involved a relatively simple and affordable solution called the ‘Magic Closer’ that I bought on Amazon following some good reviews. This product automatically closes the garage door if it is left open for a prescribed amount of time. It worked great for a while, despite the need to replace batteries quite frequently. Then, the entire faulty device had to be replaced, and even that eventually stopped working altogether after the warranty lapsed. Whether it was just my bad luck or not, it was time to move with the times and find a solution for my forgetfulness (and hastiness).
The good news is that smart home solutions have evolved a great deal in recent years. And since connected home solutions are our focus with Alana, adopting a smart home device to address this need was my obvious next step. After consulting with my expert colleagues and smart device tinkerers in the engineering department, I narrowed down my list of devices and focused my search based on the following key criteria:
Garage door support — needs to work with the current garage door opener (which by the way, post 1993 requires some safety mechanisms).
Smart home compatibility — flexibility to integrate with other devices in my home and provide automation when arriving or leaving
Smart phone operation — quite obviously I’d like to be able to check status of the door without requiring me to drive back home
Ease of installation — if I was required to spend too much time on this it might be more worthwhile replacing the garage door opener altogether
I decided to order the Chamberlain MyQ device and after a couple of weeks of needless procrastination, installed it within an hour in my garage. Good Wi-Fi reception is required, and I took the extra step to connect it like all my smart home devices to an extra secure Wi-Fi network I have dedicated for “things.”
The Chamberlain app is easy to set up and use, but even better, adding MyQ to the Wink app turned out to be even easier and instantly enabled me to do a few things:
Notifications — automatically create alerts on the smartphone if the garage door is left open for a certain amount of time.
Shortcuts — simple open/close commands to use at a click of a button allowing me to press ‘close’ just in case.
Automation — configure automation recipes (called ‘robots’ in Wink) to alert me at home if I happen to miss notifications on my phone.
Below is the video from Chamberlain that shows the process of installing the MyQ Garage.
