How to Make Your Garage Door Smart

A person's hand in a car opening the garage door with his phone. — Julia Tim/Shutterstock.com

Have you ever left your home or gone to bed only to wonder if you closed the garage door? Turning around or getting out of bed isn’t fun. If you make your garage door smart, you can close it from anywhere! Here’s how.

What a Smart Garage Door Can Do for You

Smart garage openers can save you a lot of anxiety. Instead of wondering if you remembered to close your garage, you can check from an app or ask a voice assistant, like Google Assistant or Alexa. Combined with a camera, you can even see who’s coming and going, which can be especially useful if you’re a parent. You can even schedule a daily close time at the end of the day, so you don’t have to be concerned if you forgot.

Don’t worry—you won’t always have to pull out your phone to open or close your garage door. These devices come with traditional remotes for your car and keypads for outside your garage, too—the smart features are just a bonus option.

For a smart garage door opener to work well, you need a stable Wi-Fi signal in your garage. And you might have to either replace or add hardware.

The Expensive Option: Replace Your Garage Opener

If you have a particularly old garage door opener, it might be time to replace it. If that’s the case, you can save yourself some effort and choose one that’s either smart out of the box or that you can make intelligent with a bridge.

Chamberlain: Well Known, Well Regarded

Chamberlain MyQ B970 garage door opener. — Chamberlain

Chamberlain is probably the most popular consumer-grade garage door opener manufacturer. The company offers “whisper-quiet” openers with plenty of sensors, battery backup, buttons for your cars, keypads, and so on. It also gives openers smart capabilities, like the B970 or the C870. These units have built-in Wi-Fi capability and communicate with a Chamberlain app. With a quick check, you can see if you left the garage open and then open or close it remotely.

Chamberlain even integrates with IFTT, Google Assistant, and Amazon Key, although those integrations do require a $1 a month subscription. Google Assistant can only close your garage door, to prevent someone yelling the open command through a window. This is a shame, considering many smart locks enable open voice commands with a pin.

If you have a Chamberlain garage door opener with MyQ and Wi-Fi markings on it, you already have a smart garage door opener. If you just see MyQ markings, you need a Hub.