How To Automate Your Garage Door

This post is sponsored by Chamberlain. I was paid for this post and received the featured Home Bridge as compensation.

Did you remember to close the garage door?  What about when you’re away from home, did your teen kids close the garage door after they were done in the garage? Wouldn’t it be great if you could know if your garage door is opened or closed?  Wouldn’t be cool to automate your garage door?

When we bought our garage door opener 6 years ago, I made sure our LiftMaster was MyQ® ready.  What is MyQ®?  It’s Liftmaster’s/Chamberlain’s automation capability built into all of their garage door openers since 2009. MyQ® is the brains that allows you to automate your garage door and control it remotely when paired with a MyQ® Home Bridge device.

As a mom interested in home technology, I knew I’d be dabbling in ways to automate our garage door one day.  Sure enough, the time has come!  Chamberlain sent me the MyQ® Home Bridge to install in my garage. I installed it right away.

Installing the MyQ® Home Bridge

1.  First, install the Chamberlain or Liftmaster MyQ® App, whichever garage controller you have.
2.  Before you can install the MyQ® Home Bridge, you need to ensure your WiFi signal reaches your garage.  This is essential to ensure your garage automation will be successful.  Liftmaster/Chamberlain recommends that you have at least 2 bars showing on your chosen WiFi channel.  My WiFi showed only one bar, but I continued anyway.
3.  Next, I pressed the settings button on the MyQ® Home Bridge until the blue light flashed, telling me it was ready for pairing.
4.  In the instructions, it shows that I need to press a yellow button on our garage controller 3 times.  However, to do this was not easy, as the garage controller is up high.  I remembered that my remote control that hangs next to my door into the house might have a learn button – sure enough, it did.  I pressed the Learn button and my remote garage control communicated with the app.

   Before I knew it, the garage controller had connected to the MyQ® app….success!

To open my garage door, all I had to do was press the garage door in the MyQ® app and the garage door opened.  I could see the animated garage door in the app open at the same time.  So cool!

Alerts

Once my MyQ® was connected to my garage door, I could set up alerts so I know when my garage door opens and when it closes. 

I also set up a time schedule that MyQ® will close the garage door every night at 7 pm, just in case we forgot to close it.

How To Automate Your Garage Door

Chamberlain/Liftmaster sell light switches to work MyQ® so that when the Home Bridge senses the garage door opening, your MyQ® light switches can automatically turn on.  But with today’s constantly evolving tech interactivity, you could already have some sort of home automation in your house…and MyQ® will likely work with it too.

You can link your MyQ® to other technology partners:

• Apple HomeKit™
• Nest®
• Google Assistant
• IFTTT
• XFINITY Home™
• Alpine Connect
• Wink™

Google Assistant/Google Home

As an Android fan and avid Google user, I connected my Google Assistant and my Google Home device with MyQ®.  This was easily done through the MyQ® app, although Chamberlain/Liftmaster will charge you $1/mo. for this convenience (free for the first 30 days).

Now I can interact with Google Assistant in the following ways:

• “Ok Google, ask MyQ® if my garage door is open.”
• “Ok Google, ask MyQ® if my garage door is closed”
• “Ok Google, tell MyQ® to close my garage door” 

This was my conversation I received from Google Assistant on my phone.  I also tried it with my Google Home device with similar results.

One command you’ll notice is missing is the “tell MyQ® to open the garage door.”  This would be such a handy command, especially when driving up to your garage, you could just voice to the Google assistant to open your garage door.  Unfortunately, the open the garage door voice command is not permittable due to safety reasons.

You can, however, open the garage door by opening the MyQ® app and pressing the garage door to open. 

IFTTT

Are you familiar with IFTTT – If This Than That?  It is an online website and app that allows you to easily simple commands for different technologies working together to make life easier for yourself.  For example, you can receive a notification or email when the garage door is opened. 

There are a ton of applet commands that other people have created already that you can easily make your own.  I also created a custom command so that when my Life360 app sees I’m leaving home, my IFTTT applet will automatically close the garage door…just in case I (or my soon to drive teenage daughter) forgets to.  If the garage is already closed, it will confirm it.

Here are some of the IFTTT commands I added:

Note that Chamberlain/Liftmaster will charge you $1/mo or $10 annually if you add this functionality (first 30 days free).

Apple HomeKit™

I briefly tested Apple HomeKit™ automation with MyQ®, to check the status of your garage door as well as open and close our garage door.  With the Apple HomeKit™ and a 4th gen Apple TV or an iPad, you can actually ask Siri® to open your garage door, which isn’t possible with the Google Assistant or IFTTT.

Connecting MyQ® to the Apple HomeKit™ gives you the ability to turn on or off lights and adjust the thermostat ( Nest®) once the garage door opens or closes.  Just think of it, when you leave your home and close the garage door, your Apple HomeKit™enabled lights to turn off and Nest® turns off or down the AC.  

Or when your garage door opens, your lights turn on and the AC or heat adjusts to your desired setting. 

Home automation is getting easier, giving homeowners more possibilities than ever before.

Uses:

• Close garage if it begins raining
• Air the garage out, good if you have your dogs in the garage – leave it cracked while gone, can program to close at a certain time
• Be alerted if garage door opens while at work or while on vacation
• Open garage door occasionally while on vacation – have camera in garage to watch over – shows you’re home
• If your garage remote battery dies – don’t have to rush out and get it right away
• Multiple users – can use app to open garage door – rather than just the two people who have a remote in their car
• Have command to close garage every night at 7 pm (in case kids leave it open)
• Receive alerts when there’s activity with your garage doors or MyQ® lights
• Create schedules to close your garage doors or to have your lights turn on/off at designated times
   

A Mom’s Perspective

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