Smart Garage Door Opener
With everything that goes into turning a house into a home, we often overlook some of the simplest updates that can make some of the most astounding differences, as minute as your garage door opener. Your garage door may be a staple consideration of your home’s curb appeal, the garage door opener is seldom afforded the same careful deliberation as other parts of your home. With the rise of smart technology, homeowners can upgrade nearly every component of their house to make their lives easier and their families more secure. By installing a high-tech garage door opener, you’re investing in numerous game-changing benefits that will create an effcient smart home.
History Of The Garage Door Opener
In 1926, the first electric garage door opener was invented by C.G. Johnson, the innovator who also created the overhead garage door, in order to assist those who experienced difficulty lifting the heavy doors. According to the home repair site, the Natural Handyman, the garage door opener further evolved in the 1970s as the electrical technology of the time began to catch up to homeowners’ wants and needs. The automatic garage door opener permitted people to open their garage doors from their cars as they approached their home, without needing to exit the vehicle and huddle beneath the gutters in the rain or snow.
Every few years, as technology furthers possibilities for a range of home updates, the garage door opener also undergoes an evolution that some may take for granted. According to a recent market research study by Invant Research, the garage door opener market size maintained an average annual growth rate of 4.04% in the age of smart technology, surpassing the $1 billion mark in 2017.
All in all, all that money proves that there is a lot more to garage door openers than meets the eye.
Smart Garage Overview
Smart homes are among the many hot topics for buyers, renters and sellers alike, but it’s a technology that is much more affordable and accessible than the buzzword might imply.
According to Smart Home USA, a smart home is defined as a house whose features — appliances, lighting, heating, air conditioning, television, computers, security, etc. — are capable of communicating with each other and can be controlled remotely, from either anywhere in the home or anywhere in the world. Smart technology has evolved in the same way as the electric tech in the 20th century: to save consumers’ time, money, and energy. By investing in a smart garage door opener, you get all that and more, including increased safety and security for your home, accessibility for all your family, and connectivity and automation.
Safety
The convenience alone did not advance the garage door opener to its modern design; safety concerns prompted innovators to reimagine this seemingly innocuous device. As the Natural Handyman revealed, at least 85 children in the U.S. had died or suffered permanent brain damage in accidents involving automatic garage door openers in a 20-year study. Though that number may seem nearly negligible, a test of 50 garage door openers revealed that only 40% reversed and, before reversing, exerted 130 bounds of pressure — more than enough to seriously damage an unsuspecting child.
Nowadays, many garage door openers feature sensors that emit an invisible light beam across the garage door opening, automatically reversing the door if an object or person interrupts the beam. With some smart-enabled garage door openers that connect to internet by Wi-Fi, you receive an alert to an app on your smartphone whenever this sensor is triggered, keeping you aware of any possible incidents that may occur while you’re gone.
Smart Garage Security
Perhaps one of the greatest influences behind the innovation of garage door openers was the paranoid question nearly every homeowner asks themselves whenever they leave their home: Did I close the garage door?
This simple, yet prevalent annoyance has become the dominating reason for garage door openers to dabble into the world of smart home technology. The primary feature behind most smart-enabled garage door openers is the means to monitor the status of your garage door on your phone when you’re away from home. With a simple peek on your app, you can finally answer that question, “Did I close the garage door?”, confident in your home’s security.
Some smart garage door openers also include security cameras, viewable via an app, so you can see who is entering or leaving your garage.
Accessibility
As with all eras of technology advancements, developers are pushing the abilities of their smart-enabled garage door openers more and more to make their range of features as diverse and accessible as possible.
Some smart garage door openers include no more than an app that allows you to open or close the garage door from your phone, essentially mirroring your existing garage door opener. Others, however, offer such sophisticated features as geofencing, scheduling, voice control, and more.
A few of the latest innovations of the smart garage door openers that are changing the game of the 21st century home include temperature monitoring via the smartphone app to detect how hot or cold the garage is, access management, audio warning systems, and many more types of remote alerts.
Family
Though technology and smartphones endure a stigma of driving families apart, many offerings of smart home tech are bringing household members together by eliminating common pain points from their day to day lives.
For homes wherein several drivers live, competing for the garage door opener remote can cause frequent headaches. With smart garage door openers, multiple users can download the app and set up access, sometimes as many as eight. Additionally, some models of smart garage door openers allow one user to set up accounts with multiple garage doors, making it handy to visit your close friends and family. Finally, some provide logs to see how the garage door has been used by others within the account.
Garage Door Automation
The fantastical allure of smart technology depicted in 20th-century media was always automation — the ability to schedule your home’s features to activate according to a set time or in reaction to a designated event.
With smart garage door openers, you can schedule the door to open automatically at a preset time to streamline your routine. Additionally, some offer the ability to set the garage door to automatically open or close when triggered by an event, such as when the nearby garden sprinklers start or when you are a certain distance away from home.
Connectivity
By definition, a house is a smart home if at least some of its various components are connected and able to communicate with each other. For example, bathroom lights that dim when the shower is turned on or a coffee pot that brews when an alarm is shut off. Smart garage door openers offer similar connectivity with the rest of your household.
Some can connect with smoke or carbon monoxide detectors to automatically open the garage door if those sensors detect a problem. You can also connect with your house lights so your home is illuminated as soon as you arrive. Others can connect with apps such as Google Assistant or IFTTT to further personalize your living experience.
As with anything else in this modern age of technology, smart garage door openers can offer so much more than their primary function — they may become the game-changer of the year in home improvement.