If you’re a smart home enthusiast with a garage on your property, you’ll probably want to bring that garage in line with the rest of your smart home setup. Whether the garage is attached or detached doesn’t really matter—there are useful smart garage products that are perfect for either scenario. These products generally fall into the Comfort and Convenience column of the 3 pillars of smart home products, though there is a Safety and Security element to them as well, and possibly even an Energy and Efficiency one as relates to electric car charging systems. Even so, the category mostly consists of garage door openers and their related accessories. To learn more about what these various smart garage products can do to enhance your own smart home, just keep on reading.
Why Implement the Smart Garage?
First off, let’s acknowledge the obvious—smart garage products will not be of benefit to everyone. Many of us, particularly those that live in apartments, don’t even have our own individual garages, and even among those of us with fully detached homes, having a dedicated garage certainly isn’t a given. But, even so, those that do have garages (and the numbers aren’t exactly small) are likely to see considerable appeal in products like garage door openers.
These products provide users with the ability to open and close them remotely (from virtually anywhere on the planet), the ability to monitor their use by you or others (and thus to know if something fishy is going on), and the peace of mind that comes of having the biggest door on your property monitored around the clock for safety and security purposes. But this is just a fraction of what smart garage products can do. More benefits may be found immediately below.
Key Features to Look For in Smart Garage Products
A few of the key features to keep an eye out for when it comes to the smart garage include (but are not limited to) the following:
- Durability – A good smart garage product has got to be durable! The garage is a rough and rugged part of one’s home. It’s often a place of work as well—particularly for those that enjoy DIY home improvement projects. If you’re installing a smart home product in your garage, you want it to be as tough and durable as a Chamberlain Garage Door Opener. These devices mean business. They’re tough, strong, and built to provide many years of reliable service. You should look for such qualities in any smart garage product you consider buying.
- App Control – If you can’t remember whether or not you left your garage door open when you left for work this morning, simply use your smart phone to check on the status of your door via its dedicated app. This is just one example of the many ways that your iOS or Android based smart phone may be used to manage your smart garage door. Others include opening and closing your door (or smart garage lights) remotely, checking on the temperature (or battery status) of your garage door, or being alerted to the opening/closing of your door so it isn’t being used when you don’t expect it to be.
- Smart Home Connectivity – Like other smart home products, smart garage products are often able to communicate with your other smart home devices. In this way you can control them via voice assistants (such as the Amazon Echo or Google Home) or include them in special IFTTT recipes. For instance, you might want your smart garage lights to come on at a certain time of the day, or to have your garage door open just a crack to cool your garage down when the temperature outside reaches certain highs on those really hot summer days.
Please note that not all of the features discussed above come standard with every smart garage product. Always check thoroughly to ensure that any smart garage product you’re considering has the specific characteristics and capabilities you’re looking for.
A Few Options
Chamberlain Garage Door Openers
Possibly the most popular smart garage product there is is the smart garage door opener, and nobody does them better than the good folks at Chamberlain. Take for instance their Chamberlain WD1000WFC Garage Door Opener, which connects to your iOS or Android based smart phone via a built-in Wi-Fi signal so you can control your garage door with the convenient MyQ App. This door also provides strength and durability for a long service life, as well as various control features (such as being able to open or close at any time and from anywhere) that will give you enhanced security and greater peace of mind when it comes to the important items that you keep in your garage, such as your car.
Haiku Garage Lights
Another useful smart garage product is the Haiku Garage Light by Big Ass Solutions, which provides your garage with 13,000 lumens of energy-efficient lighting for a whopping 150,000 hours of illumination over its lifetime. The Haiku Garage Light also features excellent durability thanks to its solid body construction (using anodized aluminum materials), Occupancy Sensor Technology (providing a 360 degree field of view so it comes on automatically whenever you walk into your garage or pull into your driveway), and super easy installation (since it comes fully pre-wired with a standard wall plug and 10 foot cord). It’s the epitome of convenience!
Electric Vehicle Accessories
If you drive an electric car, you might be interested to learn that you can now incorporate electric vehicle accessories into your smart garage. While products such as the Evr-Green e40 Electric Vehicle Charging Station may not be your traditional smart home devices, they do offer a number of useful features that help them to fit right in to any smart garage setup. For example, this particular station provides 9.6kW of pure power output and works harmoniously with any SAE 1772 compatible electric vehicle. It’s also compact and hardwired, featuring an easy to install NEMA Type 3R enclosure with convenient 25-foot charging cable, as well as being both vandal-proof and water-resistant. What more could one ask for in an electric car charging system?
Final Thoughts
In addition to the products discussed above, there are many other smart garage items that you may be interested in checking out. For example, there’s the Chamberlain MyQ Smart Garage Hub, the Chamberlain MyQ Garage Door Sensor, and the Gogogate2 Wireless Gate Controller Kit, among several others. The point? Simply that there are plenty of convenient smart garage solutions that you can take advantage of on your way to creating the smartest home on your block. I suggest visiting Best Buy’s main Smart Garage page to learn all about a few of these products and determine which of them might make a great addition to your own budding smart home.Â
Note: Last month’s instalment in the smart home improvements series was all about boosting your home’s smart camera presence. Each month before that (going back to the beginning of the year) we had a similarly informative article in this series. Just click on my name to see everything I’ve written recently and scroll down to find the articles that interest you most. And thanks for stopping by!
Check out Best Buy’s other great articles in the 12 months of smart home improvement series!
