Smartie Solutions by Smartie Home — Garage Door Left Open
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Here is my experience with the Eve Window and Door Sensor and how I managed to use smart technology to fix a recurring problem in my home.
The Issue
Having a baby sometimes we would walk through the garage and not close the garage door due to the sleeping baby in a car seat. However, with how our house is arranged, you wouldn’t know if the garage door is open unless you walk out to the garage for something.
Now leaving your garage door open might be okay but our suburb is pretty busy and you could easily walk by and take something. We store some of our most important things in a garage: our BBQ, pop and alcohol. You can understand we need a solution to make sure everything is safe.
The Theory
If we knew when the garage was open, we could automate a warning if it’s been open for long periods.
The Solution
Now the first thing I looked into is how to hook up a third-party solution to our garage door opener however the unit is as old as the house (20+ years) and I wasn’t looking for a $700+ solution for the newer smarter door openers. Some of the newest versions have a lot of bells and whistles, but it just opens garage doors in the end and, there is nothing wrong with our current door opener, so that was quickly discarded as an option just on the price alone.
I also knew I wanted it to work with HomeKit since all our house’s other smart things are using Apple Home.
We have other Eve products throughout our house and I have had a good experience with them out of all the smart products I have used over the years. The thought was maybe if I could jig something between the garage door and side, I could get away from the small door frame sensor. I treated it just like another door in the house and mounted it at the bottom of the door when the garage door is closed, that way we can track Open and Closed states as they are tracked in the Eve app and inside the Home app.
Before I started to solution for the garage door, I had to figure out the range of the sensor being mounted to places. I had researched multiple places and couldn’t find a measurement where the sensor still works with having a gap. I understand why Eve doesn’t release or mention anything of this in their documentation since the best most accurate would be as close as the sensors could be. After some testing, I found out it was about a 1.2 inches (3ish cm) range between the units for it to properly trigger Open/Closed status updates.
I mounted two blocks, one on the garage door and one on the side. The reason why I had to mount the unit out from being flush with the garage door is that fun fact, but garage doors aren’t truly straight up and straight down. They have a slight curve to them to handle the seal to the outside. It slightly twists as they do up on the tracks, so anything sticking out from the door, flush with it will hit the tracks as it goes up and down. After clicking the clicker several hundred times, I found the exact amount it needs to be out without hitting and have a comfy amount of room to not cause future issues of catching on the tracks of the door.
Once the blocks were mounted, I taped the sensor with some duct tape to confirm and test before I burned through the 3M stickers that come on the unit. Confirming that the sensor was triggering the proper status. The alerts were correct so I pealed the 3M stickers off and mounted both sensor pieces to each block and just finished with some gorilla tape (due to the wood areas and winter, I am not sure how well 3M will stand the Canadian winters in my unheated garage)
The Product
Eve Door & Window Sensor
This has been set up for a couple of months now and has been working well. Getting notifications when opens happen and if there hasn’t been a closed status, we know when to close it. It’s saved us a couple of times so far and I believe this will fix the issue completely.
💯 A smartie solution for sure
Have an issue and want a smartie solution, reach out to us and let’s see if we can find a smart solution using smart technology.
