HomeKit automations on public holidays

Are you tired of disabling automations on weekday holidays? Do you sometimes forget and the light turns on at 6 in the morning even though you don’t have to get up early? Look no further, you’ve come to the right place! Let me explain how to integrate a holiday calendar into HomeKit. This need comes up because sometimes we have an automation that turns on every weekday at 7:30 to wake you up, but then it turns out that today, being a Wednesday holiday, well, it shouldn’t turn on, right? You’re supposed to want to sleep in a bit longer to make the most of the day off. So normally what you have to do is remember to disable that automation so it doesn’t wake you up.

Conditional automations

You already know I’m a big fan of automations. I always say I don’t want to be shouting around the house or pulling out my phone to do certain actions. I want the house to react on its own to different circumstances. For example, if it’s nighttime and I’m not home, then there’s no need for the lights to turn on. But if it’s nighttime, I’m not home, and the lights are therefore off, but I’m approaching home, then they should turn on. This means I end up with a ton of automations that also can’t be simple ones. I don’t want my radiator to turn on at 7 in the morning during the week so I can shower after running, for example. I want it to turn on at 7 in the morning if I’m out of the house, but nearby—meaning I’m not in another city for a work trip or something like that—and if the bathroom temperature is below 14 degrees, for example. Then yes, I want it to turn on. Ever since the Home app opened up the possibility of creating a Shortcut, automation options have improved a lot and now we can create much more complex automations. We’ve talked about this before. Not only can you create them from the Home app with Shortcuts, but also from third-party apps like Controller for HomeKit, which we’ve also discussed before.

Integrating a Calendar into automations

What I want to tell you about today is exactly that: how to create an automation that takes into account whether it’s a holiday. In Home Assistant it’s really simple, honestly—in the next episode I’ll explain how to do it—but in the Home app there isn’t such an obvious option. So let’s see how it’s done. The first thing you need to do is create a Shortcut. To do that, open the Shortcuts app on the iPhone and there we’re going to add a Calendar. For that, we tell it we want to Find all events in a calendar. We create a shortcut and tell it to find all calendar events, and then right in the same Shortcut you get a start date option that’s set to, say, seven days by default. Well no, I change that and set the start date to the next day, meaning just one day, the same day. Then, the calendar should be a specific one. I’ve created a calendar called HOLIDAYS where I put all the national holidays. It’s true that iCloud already has a national holidays calendar, but besides that I also add my work holidays, for example, since there are days they give us off, I don’t know, the company anniversary, or because there’s some kind of event or something, and I also add the school calendar so I know whether certain automations that depend on, well, whether the kids have school or not, simply shouldn’t run. One of the automations I tweak most throughout the week is precisely that one: an automation that every day at 8:30 sounds an alarm, turns on the kids’ bedroom lights, and plays a song through the HomePods in their rooms—a song that one of them picks each week. As you know, I have four kids… so that’s a month without repeating a song. Anyway, the thing is, at 8:30, every day of that week, the lights turn on little by little and that song plays to help them wake up. The following Sunday, the same thing happens—another one of my kids picks the song and that automation gets updated. But of course, as I mentioned before, if it turns out that Wednesday is a holiday, or there’s a long weekend and Thursday and Friday are holidays, then that automation needs to be disabled. So it was one of the ones giving me the most trouble. That’s why I created the HOLIDAYS calendar, where I directly add not only national holidays but also local holidays and the school calendar. And that’s the calendar I linked from this shortcut. After adding the Find within the calendar to the Shortcut, I open a condition and say IF Calendar Events has any value, then stop this shortcut. What does that mean? That if there’s any kind of entry for the next day, whatever it may be—it could be an all-day event, which is how I do it, or an event from 10 to 11, since the time won’t be taken into account—then the shortcut stops. If not, it goes ahead and does whatever you want it to do. In my case, turning on the light and also adding the HomePods so they play the music and so on. That would be the action. And then you close the if statement. This is very simple, we can create it fairly easily. Figuring out the trick of Find all events in the calendar for the next day for the HOLIDAYS calendar might take a bit of effort, but the rest, as you can see, is just a regular automation. I’ll leave you the video anyway:

Automating the shortcut

After creating the shortcut, you need to trigger it at some point. To do that, you have to go into Shortcuts, to the Automation tab, and keep in mind that we can’t do this from the Home app because—don’t ask me why—the Home app can’t run certain shortcuts, especially if they involve other apps, like in this case, Calendar. However, if we create one of those Personal automations that the iPhone calls them, well, there are things that can’t be done directly with the Home app, things that can’t be executed, or sensors that can’t be read. Some Shortcuts can’t do certain things while others can’t do other things. In this case, what we do is create a Personal automation to run every day at 8:30 in the morning instead of running the conventional automation from the Home app. Remember to remove the confirmation request, otherwise when it’s about to run, it will ask for confirmation on screen. Honestly, once you figure out the trick, it’s pretty easy to do. Keep in mind that this automation runs locally, meaning on our iPhone or iPad. If the phone happens to be out of battery at that moment, the automation won’t work. And honestly, that sucks—I really don’t like it, because the other automations, the ones done through the Home app, run from whichever Accessory Hub we have. So even if the iPhone is out of battery, the automation will still work. In this case, it won’t, and that could be a problem… or not, but anyway, it’s something to keep in mind. If you don’t feel like dealing with all this and just want to download the Shortcut directly, you can do so here: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/509c6ef60581465c8428d235c7c5f799