Chamberlain MyQ Home Bridge Review: Siri & HomeKit for Your Garage Door

With the Chamberlain MyQ Home Bridge you can open or close your garage door with Siri and you can automate your home using HomeKit. This is a $69.99 upgrade for Chamberlain MyQ garage door and Liftmaster MyQ garage door openers that delivers access to Siri and adds your Garage door and Chamberlain lights to HomeKit.

I’ve been using the Chamberlain MyQ Home Bridge for several months to see just how well it works, and I’ve been using a WiFi Chamberlain MyQ Garage door opener for over two years. The Chamberlain MyQ Home Bridge is an excellent upgrade to your existing Chamberlain or LiftMaster garage door and it’s a great extension of your smart home into a smart garage.

You can buy the Chamberlain MyQ Home Bridge for $69.99 direct from Chamberlain and it is easy to install yourself if you can drill two holes and stand on a ladder. You don’t need to connect anything physically to your garage door opener or perform any complicated installation. It took me about five minutes to install the MyQ Home Bridge and another 5 to set up the smartphone portion that connects it to WiFi and adds the garage door to HomeKit.

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In addition to adding your garage door to HomeKit, this can also add your Chamberlain light switches to your garage door. You can get alerts when your garage door is opened or closed and you can connect to HomeKit to activate other HomeKit devices when the door opens. I currently have HomeKit automatically turn on a living room light when the Garage Door is opened. You can also create schedules for lights and even a schedule to close the garage door. By connecting to HomeKit you can automate a lot of items, and they don’t need to be Chamberlain. When the garage door opens, it triggers Lutron lights to turn on in the house.

One of the biggest draws of the MyQ Home Bridge is using Siri to open and close the garage door. This is awesome when it works, but you need to keep in mind the overall Siri performance. Most of the time Siri will open the garage door from the iPhone. With older Apple Watch devices Siri can time out before the door opens, or before confirming that it opened. The Apple Watch 3 is more reliable for using Siri to open the garage door. Siri hangs up because the door will often start opening, but sit there waiting and waiting for the garage door to fully open and tell the phone and HomeKit that it is open. I still use Siri to open the garage door fairly often, but I wish Apple could fine tune HomeKit and Siri to confirm that the door is opening as soon as it starts, not when it completes.

This is the easy to install MyQ Home Bridge.

If you already own a compatible smart garage door opener from Chamberlain or LiftMaster, the MyQ Home Bridge is a worthwhile upgrade for Apple users. You can check here to see if your opener is compatible. Siri is reliable enough to be useful and the HomeKit automations close the deal with smart options to turn on lights when someone opens the garage door.