Stuff We Use: Smart Garage Door Openers

On our never-ending quest to improve this place by listening to feedback from the B&B, we are taking a new tack with these product posts, choosing instead to focus on items we have actually used or purchased with our own meagre income. After all, if we’re giving you the truth about cars, we ought to give you the truth about car accessories.

Anyone fortunate enough to have an enclosed space in which to wrench on their ride probably has an overhead garage door, especially if yer out in the ‘burbs with a single-family home. Automatic garage door openers are ubiquitous in those environments – but there are a few accessories one can add to improve convenience and make life a little bit easier.

We’ll start this entry in the Stuff We Use file with a recognition there are swaths of homeowners who are concerned with cybersecurity and simply don’t want more devices in their homes connected to the internet. This is a valid take, given the reality of various and sundry ways in which bad actors can take advantage of products otherwise intended to make life a bit simpler.

Your author accepts there is indeed a certain amount of risk associated with anything online in the 21stcentury, acknowledging a trade-off between convenience and the gnawing reality that someone halfway around the globe could – in theory – open my garage door at their leisure. At this point, the benefits of a smart garage door opener currently outweigh the risks, though your opinion may vary. People were having similar conversations when automatic garage door openers first appeared decades ago; nefarious types could intercept signals from a remote, which led to the rise of rolling codes, which led to thieves coming up with ways to skirt that tech, and the cycle continues. About the only way to avoid it all is to have a garage door which one heaves skyward manually – and even then, someone can bust the lock with a prybar. Generally speaking, if someone wants in, they’ll find a way, internet connectivity be damned.

So-called ‘smart’ garage door openers are intended to provide a skiff of convenience for a busy family who may need to grant access to their home whilst not present. Think package deliveries, friends dropping by to stay the night whilst yer on vacation, or simply someone being locked out of the house. It was the latter which spurred this writer on to install one of these devices, after a phone call from a harried family member culminated in borrowing a neighbor’s ladder to gain access to the place. Had I had one of these devices at the time, I could have simply opened the garage door with a few taps on my smartphone.

Devices like this one from eBay are intended to be installed close to the physical garage door opener, a unit which generally lives on the ceiling of one’s garage or astride the door in more recent space-saving applications. Here, this new black box is actually the unit with which one’s smartphone communicates, receiving commands and then relaying them to the existing door opener. Installation couldn’t be simpler, not much more difficult than placing a new Wi-Fi box or internet router. A corded power supply is required, so one might do well to pick up a 3-to-1 outlet expander assuming there’s a standard household plug nearby (and there probably is thanks to the existing opener and its need for juice). 

This particular device works with services like Amazon Alexa for use with voice commands, again assuming one is comfortable with that amount of internet integration in their lives. With more and more cars being tied in to Alexa or Google these days, this means it is possible to utter ‘Hey Google, open the garage door’ whilst approaching one’s driveway. Note that add-ons like this do indeed communicate with the vast majority of modern garage door openers but it doesn’t hurt to check compatibility before splashing out the 40 bucks.

Alternatively, if one is taking on a fresh install or new build, just about every modern garage door opener already has all this tech built right into it out of the box. This precludes the need for any add-ons since the wireless tech is already part of the package. Costlier openers now even have cameras on them from which paranoid owners can view video in real time, something which people with Ring doorbells and the like have been doing for ages. Again, judge your level of online comfort accordingly.