Count the ways into a typical property: the front door, the garage, maybe a driveway gate, a side entrance. Now count how you control each — a clicker in one car, an app that came with the opener, a keypad by the gate, a house alarm that lives in its own world. Every entrance is an island, and none of them know the others exist.

Access control is the idea of putting all of that under one roof — one app, one login, one system that treats every entrance as part of the same whole. With Ajax, the way it does that is simpler than it sounds.

The Building Block

The Relay Is How Ajax Touches Anything

Here's the piece that makes it work. Almost every powered entrance — a garage door operator, a gate motor, an electric door strike — has a set of low-voltage control terminals that a button or clicker triggers. An Ajax Relay ($69) wires to those same terminals and does exactly what the button does: it pulses the opener on command.

The difference is where the command comes from. Instead of a dedicated remote, the relay is a device inside your Ajax system — so it answers to the app, to a schedule, or to an automation scene. Add one relay per opener, and every gate and garage on the property is suddenly controllable from the same place as the alarm. One relay, one opener, one app. Repeat as needed.

For The Garage

The Packaged Version

The garage is the most common first step, so we built it as a ready kit. The Smart Garage Control Kit ($199) pairs a Relay for open/close control with a DoorProtect Plus sensor that reports the door's real position — so you don't just control the garage from the app, you can also see whether it's open or closed and get a push the moment it changes. It's the relay concept, packaged and pre-configured, with professional installation quoted separately.

A gate works the same way — a relay on the gate motor — and once both are in the system, the app shows and drives every opening from one screen.

For People, Not Phones

The Keypad Is The Human Side

Controlling openers from an app is half of access control. The other half is letting the right people in without handing everyone a phone. That's the keypad — a code or an RFID tag at the door that arms, disarms, and grants entry, no app required.

Because codes and tags are assigned per person, access becomes something you manage, not something you hand out and hope to get back. The dog walker gets a code that works weekday mornings. A guest gets one for the week. Someone moves out, the code dies — no rekeying, no collecting fobs.

Why It's Worth It

The Payoff Is The Automation

One app instead of four is convenient. But the real reason to run access through one system is what happens when the pieces talk to each other — because every opener and keypad is now a device the system can act on:

• Disarm at the keypad, the garage opens. One code, and the door's up as you pull in.
• Arm the alarm, the gate closes. "Leaving home" locks the whole property in one action.
• The garage opens at 2am? You get the alert, because access and security are the same system now — not two apps that never spoke.

That's the difference between a pile of gadgets and an actual system. None of it requires a fresh set of hardware, either — it all runs on the same Ajax hub and app as your security, which is the whole point.