Ever have a delivery arrive at the house and wish you could open the garage door so your Trump Steaks don’t bake in the sun? Ever find yourself locked out and in need of an easy backdoor inside? The Internet of Things offers many solutions to such problems, but smart garage door openers provide a particularly promising fix to many of life’s little inconveniences. Skylink, best known for its DIY home security system, recently expanded into smart garage door openers (GDO in the company’s parlance). If you’re a hardcore DIYer, such a system might be compelling. Skylink calls the Atoms garage door opener “compact, powerful, and quiet,” and the gadget succeeds reasonably well on those fronts. It’s almost disconcertingly tiny—I dare say even stylish, for a garage door opener—but it works just fine. The mechanism on the model I reviewed (a 3/4 horsepower system) includes a belt drive, which uses a rotating sprocket attached to a long rubber belt to roll the door up and down.
Belt drives are relatively quiet, at the expense of speed. The opener is $200 and set up like any old GDO. To make it “smart,” you need an Internet Hub (another $100) which connects to your Wi-Fi router via an Ethernet cable. It is basically a bridge between your Wi-Fi network and the garage door opener, letting you use a smartphone app to control it and configure IFTTT applets, a feature Skylink calls a first for GDOs. If you’ve never installed a garage door opener yourself, you’re in for a treat. And by treat I mean eight hours of dirty, backbreaking work putting up a replacement (because you can reuse some existing hardware), or at least ten hours if you’re starting from scratch. This was the second time I’d installed a garage door opener and it still dominated most of a frustrating weekend. My biggest complaint by far is that Skylink’s installation instructions are laughably out-of-date and often flat-out wrong, as if the instructions for three or four different products were mixed up in the editing process.
Even the unit’s YouTube instructions—generally more helpful than the printed version—are inaccurate in places, and tend to gloss over some of the most difficult aspects of installation. (If you’re strong enough to simply slip the belt over the rear pulley as shown at 4:00 in the video, you don’t need a mechanical garage door opener, you can simply open it with the flick of the wrist.) Skylink initially sent me the wrong Internet Hub, and it took two tech support calls to get it working properly (again, the written instructions are poor at best). But by day four, I finally had the system running, and beyond some hiccups with the Hub, things continue working largely as promised. I can use IFTTT to text me any time the garage door opens, or have it flick on Philips Hue bulbs in the stairs when I’m coming home. Or, I can … actually, those are the only reasons I can fathom wanting to hook IFTTT into my garage door, but Skylink has other suggestions for you if you’re not too exhausted from the installation itself to tinker with it.
5/10 – Recommended with reservations.If you are like most people, you probably have paid very little attention to your garage door springs. While understandable, this oversight is also a bit unfair. There's really no single part on your garage door and garage door opener that is more important to the raising and lowering of the door. That's one reason for paying some respect to the springs. Here's another: Garage door springs are dangerous! Very dangerous, in fact. Do yourself a favor and read Garage Door Safety Tips before thinking about repairs or replacements.If you are having trouble with your garage door, it may be due to some problem with the springs. (For more information on diagnosing garage door problems, see Garage Door Troubleshooting.) Garage door springs do break, and they can be replaced. There are suppliers out there who sell replacement springs to DIYers, and there are DIYers who have safely and successfully replaced their own springs. I won't try to convince you not to take that approach if you need new springs, but I will strongly suggest that you carefully weigh the risks versus the rewards in this project before deciding to do so.
And I also suggest that you make sure your health insurance premium is paid up.This article is not a how-to on garage door spring replacement. It is intended to acquaint you with garage door springs and some of the maintenance duties you can perform yourself. There are two different types of springs used on garage doors. Torsion springs are attached just above the closed garage door, while extension springs are located above the upper tracks on both sides.Garage door springs are tightly wound, meaning they are under a lot of tension. When they break, or when some unsuspecting DIYer tries to fiddle with them, they can cause a whole lot of pain. Wise DIYers know that this is one household chore that is best left to the pros. (For tips on finding a qualified garage door pro, see How To Find the Best Garage Door Installers and Repairmen). If your garage door is old, or if it is showing signs of age, let an experienced contractor inspect your garage door springs.But if the springs are just squeaking and otherwise making a lot of noise, there are some things you might want to do before calling in the troops.
A little squeak does not necessarily mean a big problem, any more than an aching head means a brain tumor. Apply some garage door lubricant to the springs and see if it makes any difference. If it doesn't, you may have a serious problem brewing. For suggestions on the best lubricants to use on your garage door, check this site. For some additional advice on reducing the noise of your garage door, see How To Quiet a Noisy Garage Door. The two types of garage door springs discussed above work differently. A garage door with extension springs will have a safety cable on each side of the door running through the spring and attached to the wall or ceiling. These cables are an important safety feature. Extension springs are under a great deal of tension, and if one was to break, it could cause serious injury. Safety cables help control a broken spring.If you have extension springs on your garage door but can't find any safety cables, call a garage door pro and get a pair installed.The best sign of a well-functioning garage door is that it opens and closes smoothly and quietly.