How to control your old garage door with Siri and HomeKit

You don’t need to spend big money on a brand new garage door opener in order to be able to control it with HomeKit and/or Siri. Indeed, you can simply use an add-on accessory that will bring HomeKit support to virtually any garage door opener, letting you control it using Siri or the Home app on your iPad, iPhone, or Apple Watch.

I personally upgraded my garage door opener with such an accessory a few weeks ago, and in about 30 minutes, I was all set. Now this is not a hack. This is not a workaround. This is real HomeKit support, and all it requires is the meross Smart Garage Door Opener Remote, a $49 accessory you can find on Amazon.

Also see: The best Apple HomeKit garage door openers

Upgrade your garage door with HomeKit support

meross homekit garage door opener

Requirements

Besides having a functioning iPhone and garage door, the only requirement is that your garage door be supported by the meross opener. You can find a list of the hundreds of supported models in this document.

Make your garage door HomeKit compatible

The meross Smart Garage Door Opener comes with a simple set of instructions. In short, you need to unplug your garage door for obvious safety reasons. Then you will download the meross app, and set up the accessory from there.

Note that the instructions say that you can set up the opener directly from the Home app, but it didn’t work well for me. However, the meross app walks you through each step with simple illustrations and instructions, which I found was more helpful than the paper version of the manual.

I wasted a bit of time trying to understand where exactly to connect the two wires coming from the meross opener. In hindsight, I guess it was clear-ish that these two wires should be added to the same terminals as the ones coming from my garage wall opener wires. In short, you have two wires coming from your wall opener that are connected to two terminals on the actual garage door opener. The two wires coming from the meross opener must be connected to those two same terminals. So on each terminal, you would have one wire coming from your wall button opener, and one wire coming from the meross adapter.

Connecting wires and installing the hardware is quick. It just took me more time to properly conceal the wires and the meross opener as I didn’t want to have this hanging from the garage door motor.

Open and close your garage door with Siri or the Home app

Close garage door with siri and homekit

Once installed and set up, you can leave the meross app and do everything from the Home app itself, or even better, from Siri. Simple commands like “open the garage” or “close the garage” were surprisingly quickly executed.

Because of the Home app integration, you can also create automations to make sure that, for example, your garage door closes no matter what, at a preset time each day. Personally, I have an automation that locks my front door, closes the garage, and other less important actions every single day at 10 PM. If these items are already closed/locked, then nothing happens. However, if one of my kids forgot to close the garage, I have the peace of mind of knowing I don’t have to think about double checking. The Home app will close everything no matter what at 10 PM.

Troubleshooting

Despite being in an area with limited Wi-Fi coverage, I found the garage door opener to be incredibly fast at taking my queries. However, I kept noticing an exclamation mark on the garage door button inside the Home app. I assumed it was because of the limited internet connectivity, but after a bit of digging around, I realized there was a firmware update available for the meross opener inside of the meross app. After completing the firmware update, the exclamation mark went away and never came back.

Another issue I had was the Home app periodically throwing an Obstruction Detected error in the app. Although the door would open/close without issue, that error bugged me. So again, a bit of googling around helped me figure out that I needed to make adjustments to the meross opener settings. Inside of the meross app, go to your garage door settings, and look for the Opening time option under Advanced settings. This opening time setting is the time your garage door takes to open or close. By default, I believe it is set to 15 seconds. I timed my garage door at 18 seconds and made the adjustment inside the meross app, but I was still getting the Obstruction Detected error. So I increased the opening time even further and set it to 20 seconds. That little change fixed the error, which I haven’t seen since.

Should you make your garage door HomeKit compatible?

If you’ve made it that far, then the answer to this question is undoubtedly yes. Clearly, you are already deep into the Apple ecosystem and want to control things with your iPhone or using Siri, and create automations.

To me, the relatively low cost of the meross Smart Garage Door Opener Remote is really worth the upgrade my garage door just got. It is quick and simple to install, and it has proven to be reliable over the course of the last few weeks. Of course, the ability to control the garage door with your iPhone, Apple Watch, or Siri is the one feature we’re most interested in, and this has been flawless in my experience. Go for it, get that meross Smart Garage Door Opener Remote!