The Tech We Use – 1
Though there is much to write about from last 5 years, I felt this’ll be a good place to divert from it all.
One piece of almost everyone’s life now revolves around Tech.
I thought of starting this “series” in the journal, around the tech in our household that we use daily or which we are using to make our life easier and my two cents about it.
I have previously written a blog about all the phones I have had: https://rav0o.tumblr.com/post/46821998749/my-gadgets but, this’ll be my tech review podium.
The two things I want to talk about here is:
MyQ Smart Garage Opener: Amazon Link
First thing first: Regular price for this is around 35-40 USD. But I bought it during Christmas-2019 for 18 USD. So, if anyone thinks about buying it, by reading a line, WAIT for the price to drop 😊
My Thoughts:
Our home is relatively new and our Garage Door openers are in pretty good condition. Two reasons why I wanted to buy this was, having one more thing controlled by the small screen in our palms and when we go for walks/run in morning, not to worry about carrying the remote.
Also, our garage door is our primary mode of entry/exit into our home, so having a smart door opener would let me use my voice to open/close the door was the dream (One more step towards budget Iron Man). Below is the experience:
Installation process is smooth. The app walks you through the whole set up process and has clean and easy instructions and this is the only good part about it.
After this, it is all downhill:
The MyQ app is NOT particularly good, for android or apple. It closes the door with a success rate of almost 100 percent; but opens only 50% of the time. That rate of success for opening, has shaken my confidence in it. My WiFi is not an issue, as next to MyQ sensor the signal strength is 100%. Even my brother in law faces same issues at his home.
Alerts do not work. I tried setting up an alert to notify me after 2 or 4 hours of door being left open and it does not work. MyQ did not send notification/alert to our phones when I left the door open for testing and when it started sending we got alerts for every time we opened the door. This is particularly annoying, when we return around 9/10 at night, because the alert came at 1-2 AM at the night
The Ok-Google integration, is not even an attempt worth mentioning. It does not work. Most of the time, MyQ responds with, Sorry for security reasons, I cannot perform the action.
So, would I recommend, I would say – MAY BE
We mostly use this for our peace of mind when we are going on trips to double check the garage door status. Thankfully, this has not been wrong. If anyone needs to use this as an actual garage door opener replacement, it’s better to stay away from it until the behavior is dependable.
I hope, Chamberlin fixes the bugs. I have had it for almost an year and I have gotten used to walking with my garage door opener :P
Solar Lights: Amazon Link
Though the above is not exactly a “tech” piece, but it has made our life a easier and using solar power for illumination in my books falls under tech. We have got two of these, one in backyard and another in front and to me they are a no brainer. We get enough sun at these two spots and these guys detect motion and switch on.
My Thoughts:
They are very bright, and the motion sensor is very good. The backyard one starts up even when it detects vehicle going from the side of road, which is almost 10 feet away at a sharp angle.
I don’t have much to say about this, but that it’s an easy recommendation, specially if anyone wants good illumination in their backyard without the hassle of managing cables and using energy source which is FREE.