You have a huge entry point to your house when you consider your garage. For many homes, there is a direct connection from the garage to the main property through an internal door. Yet garage security is generally overlooked. For car enthusiasts or homeowners with expensive vehicles or equipment, securing your garage should be as important as securing your front door.

Mechanical Door Security: The Baseline

In the absence of technology, your door must have good mechanical security to begin with.

When considering a door, the following features are essential:

– Multi-point locking: A quality sectional door should have multiple latching points. Basic up-and-over doors often lack this feature.
– Ground anchor: An anchor that locks the bottom of a roller door to the ground. It is relevant for roller door shutters used in an outbuilding or detached garage.
– Cylinder lock guard: A guard that protects the key lock cylinder from drilling and snapping (the most common attacks on lock cylinders).
– Anti-lift protection: A preventive measure that stops the door from being lifted off the tracks (a common feature of some up-and-over doors).

Electric Openers and Rolling Code

Remote controlled electric garage doors must use a rolling code (or hopping code).

This essentially means that it’s impossible to capture or save a signal since the access code changes every time the remote is used. If your build is more than ten to twelve years old, it might have a fixed code system, a real problem that makes an upgrade worthwhile.

Many operators now engage an automatic deadbolt when a door closes, so the motor mechanism acts as a lock and makes it much harder to force the door open. When a door is closed and the power is on, a motor locks the door much more securely than most manual locking systems.

Remote Monitoring

Smart garage systems with Wi-Fi allow users to check the status of their garage doors from anywhere using an app. This is a great feature for the millions of people who blindly drive off wondering if they remembered to shut the garage.

The better systems extend notifications to users if a door is left open for X amount of time, for example, ten minutes, and prompt users to go close the door. Some also have a feature that sends alerts every time a door is used, giving users a record of the access and who did it. This is convenient for those users who share the remote with their families.

Smart Home Integration

Integrating your garage door into a home automation system is a good use of your money because it adds a great deal of control to your home:

• Google Home / Amazon Alexa: Voice commands to control the opening and/or checking of the status of the door.

  Most large motor brands, including Hörmann, Chamberlain, and Nice, have native app integrations for one or both platforms.

  Apple HomeKit: This integration requires a compatible controller and allows the garage door to show up in the App and be added to automations.

  Geofencing: Some systems offer automatic opening of the garage as your phone’s GPS shows you approaching it, or closing when you leave. This is useful but should have a minimum distance set to avoid opening when you are just passing by.

  IFTTT / Home Assistant: For more advanced automation, users can close the garage if left open at 10 pm or turn on a light when the garage opens.

  Cameras and Visual Verification: A camera in the garage adds visual verification to remote status and a lot of smart door units now have a camera in the motor unit to record what’s happening when the door is opened which is a useful deterrent and a record of any tampering that may have occurred.

  Internal Access Door: If the garage communicates with the house through an internal access door, that door should get the same level security consideration. It should be a solid core door and a multi-point lock fitted along with an appropriate fire-rated specification if the door opens into the living area.

  Once an intruder enters the garage, they’ll be stopped in their tracks by this as a second layer of defense and a big one at that, especially if it is properly designed.

  ### Putting It Together

  The most effective garage security combines layers of quality mechanical systems, electronic access control, and remote management. Even if you have just a rolling-code motor combined with a well-constructed multi-point locking garage door, you’ll be much better protected than average in comparison to many older units. Add remote management and you’ve closed the two primary weaknesses of security systems: physical control and the inability to know the status of your garage door if you’re away.