Knowledgeable’s Score
Execs
- Straightforward to put in
- Wonderful video high quality, day and night time
- Intuitive to function, for each residents and guests
Cons
- “Non-compulsory” subscription plan could be very costly
- It takes all day to cost its battery
- We encountered the occasional glitch within the myQ app
Our Verdict
Chamberlain’s myQ model combines a video doorbell with an exterior door controller to make a no brainer improve for any storage with a wise storage door opener.
Value When Reviewed
$99.99
Finest Costs In the present day: myQ Good Storage Video Keypad
$84.23
$99.99
The world has lengthy since come round to doorbells doing double obligation as safety cameras. Chamberlain and its myQ model of sensible storage door merchandise brings that idea to your storage door with the myQ Good Storage Video Keypad.
It’s a essentially easy thought, changing the outside storage door opener keypad you may have already got. The acquainted numeric keypad is replicated on this machine, together with a movement sensor and a 1080p video digital camera with a 160-degree viewing angle (measured diagonally).
The unit is appropriate with LiftMaster, Chamberlain, Craftsman, Raynor, and AccessMaster storage door openers manufactured after 1993, and it requires no direct wiring to the opener; the truth is, there’s no everlasting wiring of any sort.
Video recordings are straightforward to sift by through the app’s Historical past tab, and clips are fast to load
Powered by a beefy lithium-ion battery, which myQ says ought to final for 1 to three months earlier than a recharge is required (relying on frequency of utilization). I’d advise planning forward when endeavor your preliminary battery cost or recharging, nevertheless; after I linked it to a PC through a micro-USB cable, the battery took almost 10 hours to completely cost.
The myQ Good Storage Video Keypad comes with a full-featured app, however you’ll have to pay for a subscription if you need any video historical past of what occurred at your storage door.
Christopher Null/Foundry
Set up and setup
Charging time apart, set up is a straightforward course of. If in case you have an older storage door opener, you merely observe the directions within the myQ cell app to pair the keypad together with your opener by urgent the study button on the unit on the acceptable time. New storage door openers which have built-in Wi-Fi can skip this step and pair straight with the keypad.
I examined the keypad with each sorts of opener—an previous Chamberlain and a brand-new myQ-connected Liftmaster—and located the method seamless both means. If in case you have a myQ opener, the method is much more painless, as you needn’t climb a ladder to hit that “study” button. Connectivity is through 2.4GHz Wi-Fi solely, however I had no points linking the keypad to my dwelling community.
As soon as configured and up to date with new firmware, the unit mounts to the wall outdoors your storage with an included, angled bracket and two screws. (The adjustable myQ “swivel mount” that gives an extra 100 levels of customization, which you’ll see on the corporate’s web site is a separate $30 buy.)
The keypad then affixes to the bracket and will be held in place with an extra screw on the underside of the keypad to stop hooligans from working off with it.
The myQ Good Storage Video Keypad has a numeric keypad with two additional buttons: one that individuals can use to provoke a two-way name to your smartphone, and one other that closes an open door with no need a PIN.
Christopher Null/Foundry
Day-to-day utilization
Operation is kind of easy from right here: You possibly can open and shut the storage door by tapping within the code you set, and extra visitor PINs can be added—together with auto-expiring momentary PINs and recurring PINs that enable entry solely on sure days and at sure occasions every week. A complete of 16 PINs will be created.
A telephone button is included that works very similar to a video doorbell, alerting you in your cell phone that somebody at your storage door, and permitting you to have interaction a two-way audio function so you possibly can resolve if you wish to let the customer into your storage. Notifications can take just a few seconds to achieve your telephone, however I discovered them speedy sufficient for typical use.
Efficiency
The built-in movement sensor is fast to have interaction and start capturing any exercise round your storage door, and its sensitivity will be adjusted to get rid of false alarms from issues like leaves blowing within the wind. You may also set the machine to alert just for folks detection, although for my dwelling, I like a broader view that can alert me if both a automobile or an animal arrives within the driveway.
That mentioned, you’ll have to fastidiously take into account placement if you wish to get a major view of your environment, as a typical set up will likely be dominated by the storage door to the tune of about 40 % of the video picture.
Video appears surprisingly good for 1080p decision. Daytime clips have been clear and colourful, and commonplace infrared night time imaginative and prescient illuminates nighttime clips crisply to at the very least 30 ft. (When it’s darkish outdoors, the keypad additionally lights up when a button is pressed.)
All video is saved on myQ’s cloud service, and if there’s a catch with the machine, that is it. With no native storage possibility obtainable, a plan is required if you wish to do a lot of something apart from see a dwell stream of video, get movement alerts, and use the two-way audio function.
A beefy lithion-ion battery doubtless accounts for at the very least among the myQ Good Storage Video Keypad’s thick dimensions.
Christopher Null/Foundry
Individuals detection and video clip storage, playback, and downloading are all locked to a subscription plan. The plan prices $4/month or $40/yr for a single machine with seven days of historical past included. Improve to $10/month or $100/yr to help a number of gadgets with a 30-day storage plan. For a person who simply needs the occasional take a look at what’s occurring on the storage door, these are each expensive choices—particularly in case you’re already paying different safety digital camera and doorbell producers for cloud storage.
Subscription not likely non-compulsory
In the event you do have a subscription plan—a 30-day trial is included at no cost—video recordings are straightforward to sift by through the Historical past tab within the app, and clips are fast to load. Clips are restricted to 50 seconds in size, longer if they’re initiated by somebody urgent the decision button. There’s no official cooldown between clips aside from a 3.5-second timeout required for the system to wake itself again up.
All informed, I encountered only some issues in day by day use; specifically, just a few thriller errors often saying “There’s an error together with your keypad” with no additional steerage. This normally occurred whereas making an attempt to load a dwell stream. A force-quit and restart of the app normally resolved these points.
One caveat price mentioning: it’s vital to notice that the myQ Video Keypad is an unbiased machine from the myQ Good Storage Management Hub, which helps you to function a storage door opener utilizing your telephone. The 2 gadgets do not work collectively. Particularly, the Video Keypad allows you to open and shut the door by punching in a PIN code straight on the machine whereas additionally offering a video feed to your telephone. However you can’t use your telephone to open the storage door in case you solely have the Video Keypad.
To do this, you will need to even have a separate myQ Good Storage Management hub (or a storage door with myQ inbuilt). It’s a bizarre omission, as you nicely may want to shortly open the door for a customer in entrance of the digital camera, equivalent to a supply particular person, as an alternative of giving them a PIN (otherwise you won’t have an additional PIN arrange). Needing two gadgets for such a scenario borders on obnoxious.
Must you purchase the myQ Good Storage Video Keypad?
Like all myQ merchandise, the Video Keypad integrates with Ring and Vivint sensible dwelling environments, in addition to Amazon Key and IFTTT. An costly subscription and one sadly lacking function however, the myQ Good Storage Video Keypad is an effective worth by itself. In the event you use both of the famous ecosystems, it’s much more so.
This text was first revealed on TechHive.