Bringing it up again: Garage doors and PIN management

Hello All! First post, and glad to be here.

We recently purchased a house as an investment for AirBnB, and I’m currently installing all the smart gear I can get my hands on. I’m not gonna lie, I’m a bit of a tech-geek and this kind of automation is a lot of fun. I have lights, TV’s, and door locks reporting to a smartthings 3rd Gen Hub, and it seems to be working good enough so far. I have a geothermal furnace installed in the house and I’m hoping to be able to integrate it as well.

I want the garage door to work as smoothly as the door locks. I wish to be able to send my guests temporary PIN’s to use on a keypad or (preferably) phone app to open the garage door. I’ve searched here and I see this topic is not new, but most of the results I see are a couple of years old. I also found a recipe to use a smart door lock to send an open/close command to the garage door opener (which I’m not opposed to doing, as a last resort).

So, in a nut shell, who’s smart garage door openers are reliable and compliant with my system? I’d love to hear a fresh round of reviews.

Since this is for Airbnb, you should definitely get a UL listed garage door opener. Do not go with a hack where you just hotwire the door opener. You can’t trust that your guests will use a remote control responsibly, and the liability will be all yours.

There still a couple of good options to consider. The most popular is probably the go control zwave model which is on the official “works with smartthings” list. It’s UL listed, works well, and is widely available.

You will see some complaint threads about it, but that’s just because it is so popular, so when there are a few bad devices, as there are with any electronics, there are enough of them that the reviews get posted. But the overall star averages are high at all the retailers.:sunglasses:

MyQ from Chamberlain Is also a very high-quality garage door opener, UL listed, But doesn’t have an official integration. There’s an unofficial one which seems to work OK if you want to look at that:

[RELEASE] MyQ Lite Door and Lamp Control (for Liftmaster/Chamberlain)

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As far as adding a pin number and/or keypad, see the following FAQ:

FAQ: Can I add a keypad to control my garage door?

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Yeah, I found this one. It’s the last resort I mentioned. I was hoping someone had developed a more complete product in the last 2 years.

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Not that I’ve seen. Hopefully someone will post if they know of a new one. :sunglasses:

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To add to what JD said, you can check out this topic first post about ZigBee keypads which can be mounted outside your garage, they are pretty cheap to buy and easy to mount.

The keypads can be programmed easily using the built in SmartLocks app. Or if you have access to RBoy Apps, you can check out this app which synchronizes your keypads to you garage door in SmartThings, so when folks “unlock” the keypad it opens the garage and vice versa.

If you’re looking at AirBnB, check out this app, which can generate your codes automatically for your guests and also program your ZigBee keypads (manually or automatically). It can also program your locks and activate/deactivate other devices around the house like lights, HVAC’s etc when your folks check in and check out.

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