What's happening in YouTube, Josh Teder here for 6 Months Later and today
we're going to be taking a look at the Nexx Garage Wi-Fi enabled companion
device. We'll take a look at how easy it was to set up, the main features of the
device and app, and how reliable it's been over the past six months.
This is 6 Months Later.
When you think about the term smart home devices, people often think of smart
lights smart thermostats and maybe even smart speakers and while those are the
first things a lot of people think about, smart garage door openers are not that
far off. Smart garage door openers have a lot of
benefits. You can check the status of your garage door to see if it's open or
closed 24/7, whether you're at home or away from home, and if you're away from
home you can even open and close the garage door from miles away. The only
issue with most homes out there is they already have a garage door opener and
most likely it's five ten fifteen years old and does not connect to Wi-Fi. Enter
the Nexx Garage, a Wi-Fi enabled companion device for your garage door
opener that allows you to connect it to Wi-Fi. The Nexx Garage works with a
variety of brands of garage door openers out there and they have a complete list
of compatible and incompatible garage door openers that it'll work with on
their website. Some high level features of the next garage include multi-user
support where you can give access to multiple people to be able to open and
close your garage door through their phones.
The Nexx Garage can be set up to notify you when your garage door is closing or
opening and you can even set the next garage to remind you that you've left
the garage door open for too long. The Nexx Garage can also use your phone's
location to automatically open and or close your garage door when you are near.
It it also keeps a log of every time your garage door has been opened or
closed and by whom. Nexx Garage supports the Google
Assistant and Alexis you can ask either smart assistant to open and/or close
your garage door as well as what the current status of your garage door is.
Me: "Hey Google, talk to Nexx Garage."
Google Home: "Hi, I have detected that your garage door is currently closed. What would you like
to do?" Me: "Open the garage door." Google Home: "Your garage door should now be opening."
Now we've done a ton of videos on the Google Home products specifically on this channel, so
if you'd like to learn more about those, I'll make sure to leave links in the
description below as well as add a card to the video that you can click to learn
more. The Nexx Garage is a product that's made
up of a couple of pieces. You have two pieces of hardware and one piece of
software which is the phone app for the pieces of hardware the main piece of
hardware is the receiver for the Wi-Fi signal it comes with a power adapter
that you plug into presumably your ceiling where your garage door is
plugged into and then it also comes with two wires that tap directly into your
garage door opener. The second piece of hardware is a long wire with a sensor
and magnet on one end you put the magnet on the garage door itself and then the
sensor on the wall right next to the garage door and you want to make sure
they're lined up evenly so that the magnet and sensor are together and
almost touching when the garage door is closed. This allows the Nexx Garage to
know whether or not your garage door is open or closed.
Now the design of the hardware pieces of the next garage leave a lot to be
desired when you open the box and get it shipped to you it basically looks like a
do-it-yourself kit, not that that's a bad thing but if you are the type of person
that likes all of your electronics to be sleek looking etc this may not be the
device for you, but then again it's going into garage and who really cares about
what it looks like if it's going in a garage. Now setting up the Nexx Garage
was relatively straightforward but it's not exactly a short process it does take
a bit of time to set everything up correctly now you don't have to have a
lot of technical knowledge to be able to set up the Nexx Garage but it's not a
plug-and-play consumer electronic device where you just plug the thing in and
setup takes like five minutes. On average, it took me about 30 minutes to set
everything up and get it working. Now how the Nexx Garage actually
works is the device receives a Wi-Fi signal to the receiver that instructs it
to open or close the garage door and then the next garage receiver device
sends an electrical signal to your garage door opener to open or close the
door. Now I like this approach a lot better than some other garage door
opener Wi-Fi enabled companion devices out there because one
there's no annoying beeping every time the garage door closes and two I just
like the fact that the device connects directly into the garage door opener
itself. You're not really changing anything about the garage door opener
but it is tapping directly in through wires to your existing garage door
opener now one thing I noticed during setup of my next garage is that I had
some Wi-Fi problems in my garage. So what I recommend even if you don't have Wi-Fi
problems in your garage is go ahead and set up that next garage receiver right
near your Wi-Fi router first and then move it out to the garage. What I found
for my case is that especially when the garage door itself is closed I have very
poor Wi-Fi signal in my garage which made setting up the Nexx Garage kind of
a pain but this also leads me to my next point which is to make sure that you
have good Wi-Fi reception in your garage. Definitely test the Wi-Fi signal when
the garage is open as well as when it's closed. In my case what would happen is I
set up the next garage everything was great I would use the remote in my car
to open my garage door like normal and then I could close the garage with the
Nexx Garage phone app but then as soon as the garage door closed
the Wi-Fi signal on my garage dropped and then my device went offline and I
couldn't open my garage door opener with my phone through the next garage app. Now
if you're in the situation that I was and you don't get enough good Wi-Fi
signal in your garage for the next garage to work like 99% of the time what
I would suggest is looking at getting a mesh Wi-Fi network such as one from
Google with their Google Wi-Fi product we've actually just recently
done a review on that so if you're interested I'll make sure to drop a link
below and put a card in the video now after I fix my Wi-Fi issue I found that
the next garage works about 99% of the time and has been great there have been
a few hiccups here and there where it shows the incorrect status of the garage
door opener or sometimes I'll just get phantom notifications of my garage door
opening and/or closing even though I didn't open an or closed it and can look
out the window and see it's still closed so overall for reliability I'd give the
next garage and a - it's not perfect and you may run into a few hiccups along the
way but it gets the job done and still works pretty well now the app design for
the next garage is functional but overall I'm still not really a fan of
the overall colors and design aesthetic of the app I think it could really
benefit from some UI and UX enhancements around the overall look and feel of the
app now that's not to say the app is terrible it's not it works fine and it
is functional but I still think it could benefit from some UI and UX improvements
now when I started using the next garage app six months ago I did run into
several issues with using the app with menus I couldn't scroll them all the way
up and it would take me several taps to trying to get a button to complete an
action that I wanted it to do so luckily the next garage app has improved over
the past six months and I have not run into nearly the amount of problems I
originally ran into when I first started using it now another area I think the
next garage could benefit from is having an Apple watch app for most apps I don't
think it's really necessary for them to have a companion watch app but for the
next garage I actually think it makes a lot of sense a lot of times when you're
going out to your garage you're coming back from the grocery store you've got
your hands full and it can be kind of cumbersome to get your phone out of your
pocket to close the garage door now another way the next garage folks could
fix the issue especially for people with iPhones
by having homekit support and allowing users to use Siri to open and or close
their garage door this is a glaring omission for the next garage I'm
typically a big fan of these smart device makers having all three platforms
so Alexa Google assistant and home kit and Siri and unfortunately for the next
garage right now you're limited to only using Alexa and the Google assistant the
next garage retails for $100 here in the US and is available in some
international countries as well overall I think it's a great device if you'd
like to add some smart functionality to your existing garage door opener
well that's by no means perfect it's a pretty solid device that gives you a lot
of convenient features that make living with a garage door opener even easier
thanks so much for watching this six months later review be sure to leave a
comment and let me know what you thought and if you like this video make sure to
give us a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel if you'd like to see more videos
like this one thanks again for watching until next time
I'm Josh Teder for 6 Months Later.