Best Garage Door Opener for Home Assistant in 2021?

Moving into a new home, so exploring options to automate my garage doors.

Previously used OpenGarage, which has been good. Functionality has been great in terms of opening/closing, but the door sensor is hit or miss in extreme hot or cold. Wish the door sensor was more reliable…

Before landing on OpenGarage, I tried:

  • MyQ - absolute garbage.

  • Z-wave - only tried the control connection, but this was before HA supported it well and I also had distance issues. It’s also 2-3x more expensive than OpenGarage.

I’m looking now at Tuya based systems, ESPHome (which I believe can actually run on OpenGarage hardware), or going back to OpenGarage.

What is this community finding to be the most reliable with the best integration into HA?

I can only speak from my own experience, but I’ve been happy with my Insteon Garage I/O Linc and with my MIMOlite Z-Wave garage door controller. The Insteon has been rock solid except for one device failure after years of use, but if you don’t use or want to use Insteon then the Z-Wave is good as well.

I’m just starting with HA and Insteon. I hooked up the I/O Linc to work with my garage door and it worked fine in the now defunct Insteon app. HA recognizes the I/O Linc and displays it as 2 UI elements. Operating the Relay part works fine to open/close the door, but the sensor ALWAYS says closed and when I looked at logs (as far as I know how to do), there was no event triggered for the sensor.

Since you have it working, do you have any clues or suggestions?

I’m running HA in docker on a Synology box.

I actually still use the door sensor that came with my Insteon but it’s tied into my MIMO now. That being said, there are a few things I’ve learned from using that sensor:

  • You need to glue that down to your garage floor and make sure the sensor on the door is aligned properly, if you don’t line them up the you’ll get incorrect readings (no different than when you install door and window sensors of any brand)
  • Sometimes the device will stick, so I whack it a few times with a rubber mallet to dislodge anything. I’ve only had to do this a couple of times in 20 years

Otherwise, it should work just fine with your IOLinc since the garage controller was an IOLinc anyway. I would take the door sensor off and simulate the open/close operation by moving that magnet around the floor sensor.

Worst case, you can add any door/window sensor in many creative ways to detect the state of the door, even adding reed sensors directly on the door track.

I don’t have the magnets that were in the Insteon Garage Door package. I just had the I/O Linc from some beginner package from Insteon of switches, etc. I wired up my remote myself into the I/O Linc and took a house window alarm and hooked that up myself too. The magnet is mounted to the top of the door and the alarm sensor is triggered by that coming near. It all worked with the Insteon App just fine.

So the question is, does the HA UI work properly with the I/O Linc nowadays in the HA Docker setup?

I don’t see why it wouldn’t, it just two contact wires that feed into the input of the IOLinc. I am phasing Insteon totally out so I don’t have an IOLinc in place any longer, but it was working fine with HA before I got rid of it.

Doh! Sometimes the most obvious problem is the problem. I took a closer look at the magnet. Somehow it got misaligned with the alarm sensor. It was stuck to the metallic door and taped. But apparently it either moved, or the door shifted, or the magnet was stronger before. I hadn’t used the open from the Insteon app in a while, so probably it wasn’t working there either anymore.

So I moved the magnet to align with the pickup and voila, it worked.

However, it seems it suffers from the same problem I saw someone report back in 2018. When the door is open it says closed and vice versa. Maybe they didn’t apply the same fix to the version I’m running under Synology DSM docker.

So now I have to figure out how to get HA to show the correct status.

Thanks for verifying that it SHOULD work. I’m glad I looked at the alignment first because I was considering disconnecting the I/O Linc and checking out the continuity of the wire. Move the magnet was easier.

I had to do this as well: create a garage door cover template that reverses the value of the open/close sensor and your problem is fixed.