Zooz ZEN51 to Control Garage Door

[k8gg]

I have an extra ZEN51 around. So figured it is time to do this.

ZEN51 has got 5 pigtail wires from the device… with a physical button to toggle the switch on/off by default… with dry contact control.

Dry contact part is important because you would not want to energize your garage door push button with 120 (or 230) VAC.

And then, obviously for garage door openers, you are not going push the button (ie turn on the switch) for anything longer than a few seconds… So it is key for the switch to be able to turn off automatically, after maybe 0.5 or 1 seconds. Meaning, you want the dry contact relay to act like a momentary switch.

So it’s a good thing when there’s a parameter (7 to be specific) where you can set the switch for garage mode.

Wiring diagram that was confirmed from Zooz support (and BTW the support was good - quick and to the point):

Note that:
a) I asked whether we could power the ZEN51 via a 5V or 12V DC … and the answer is a no.
b) My garage door opener is a dumb one, and not those units with “Security+ 2.0”. This is important, because unlike the newer GDO these days, I can still open/close the door by shorting the terminals.
c) If your GDO being the newer ones, fret not - you could still use something like this or this or this.

Now, a couple of photos from my install:

Wires from red & blue of ZEN51 to the terminals on my garage door opener. I harvested some wires from a LAN cable. Also, it’s a dry contact with (I believe) 3.3V, so the colors or directions of the wires does not matter.

I twisted my wires… read it somewhere that the wires might act as antennas that would short / energize… and open the door unintentionally… definitely don’t want that. Please let me know if this is unnecessary and whatever I read was wrong!!

This is to power the ZEN51. Use the correct gauge of wires if you want to do this - do not use any ethernet wire here. I recycled the black AC cable from a garbage disposal grinder thingy that I hardwired. N to neutral (white) and L to line (black) please.

So this what I have in the end:

The receptacle is on the ceiling - see upper right corner of the photo above. One of the black cable goes to ZEN51, and the other one goes to my garage door opener.

I probably would / should find a plastic project box to enclose the ZEN51 and wire nuts, etc. But that’s for another day (I guess I need a box to meet the code… yes?)

Now, questions? I’d love to help.
Or comments? Did I just do something stupid?

[PeteRage]

As you allude to It’s against electric code and a fire hazard to have those 110v wire nut connections outside of an electrical box. Get a proper metal electrical box and put the entire assembly in it and make sure you ground it. It’s also a best practice to use electrical tape around the wire nut on the hot wires. You really do not want this one getting loose.

[k8gg]

Forgot to come back for an update.

Oh yes, thank you. I did a v2 a week later… basically took a power adapter from a broken laptop or game console or whatever,
(this is for illustration only. mine was similar like this, but for an hp laptop)

… got the gut of the laptop ac adapter out, desolder the ac and dc wires from the internals of the adapter, and then re-wire the whole ZEN51 setup again, put everything back into the shell of the laptop ac adapter.

I recycled a metal plate from the gut of the original ac adapter, trim the plate, and put it back inside, so that half of the adapter shell (the half that has all the wires) would/could be grounded, the ZEN51 sits inside the other side of the shell… tested the z-wave wireless transmission, and all OK.

If you ask me, the form factor of the ac adapter is a perfect fit in this case.

[hecarethwosu (HeCareth)]

I used a Zooz ZEN16 for this, as I just needed to connect the contacts from the buttons in the wall into the mountable relay and they plug it via USB and a 1mp power block. I think the concept is all the same though.