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"  In my last blog post I reported on an alternative to portable generators if you have a natural gas line or a propane tank in your home. But what if you can&amp;#039;t even get into your house without power? 70% of Americans use their garage door as the primary entrance to their house. Many people don&amp;#039;t even carry house keys with them because they use either the clicker in the car to open the door or the keypad next to it. But if you&amp;#039;re one of these people and your house loses power, you can find yourself stranded until you can get a locksmith to come and change the locks. A great way to avoid this problem is to use a garage door opener with a battery backup. Chamberlain and LiftMaster, two garage door openers that offer this feature, have earned the Good Housekeeping Seal. Note, that while the Chamberlain line is considered a do-it-yourself product, you won&amp;#039;t find installing it yourself an easy task unless you&amp;#039;re a hardcore DIY-er, so check out the LiftMaster line which are professionally installed.  The batteries in the LiftMaster line are intended to last for approximately 40 opening and closing cycles which should be more than enough to see you through a brief blackout from bad weather. One of the really interesting things about these garage door openers is that they use a new technology, called MyQ, which lets you monitor your garage door over the internet. This lets you stop worrying, &amp;quot;Did I leave the garage door open?&amp;quot; You can log onto the LiftMaster website and see whether or not you left it open. MyQ also lets you monitor the door openings and closings when you&amp;#039;re not home, which could come in handy if you want to know just what teenagers are doing when you&amp;#039;re not around. You can also set the door to automatically close in five minutes which should really put an end once and for all to worries about whether or not the door is closed. To use this feature you need to buy the MyQ Internet Gateway for around $40 and connect it to your wireless router. The yearly service fee hasn&amp;#039;t been decided yet but the company is estimating around $10/year. For more information on the Good Housekeeping Seal please see our video and About the Green Good Housekeeping Seal. If you&amp;#039;re interested in other ways technology can help you, check out Charging Cell Phones With Motion-Recharged Batteries on thedailygreen.com. And if you&amp;#039;re going to be in the NYC area, be sure to come take a tour of our labs! "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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