Some of my automations in HomeKit

I wanted to save this post for a future private section of the website where only premium subscribers could get in, a sort of Patreon or Ko-Fi thing to see if I could get rich off home automation… but since that doesn’t seem to be happening, I’ve decided to tell you about some of my automations in HomeKit. The HomeKit tag is because all of them are created from the Home app and from Shortcuts, with no third-party apps, but in reality they’re automations I also use in Home Assistant whenever Apple pisses me off! At that point, I disable all the automations from the Home app and cling to Home Assistant for dear life, thinking it’s my new shepherd… but then my fanboy side kicks back in, I go back to HomeKit and disable all the Home Assistant automations so that only the ones I have in HomeKit run. Basically they’re the same in both environments. I also hadn’t talked about this before because it’s very easy to ‘get carried away’ and end up tangled in automations that don’t actually solve any real problem you have. I’m sure some idea will stick with you or you’ll find some of the automations I mention interesting… but think about whether it actually solves something for you. I hope you find all of them useful or think they add value and make life easier, but if they’re not automations you truly need, you’ll see how they end up falling out of use and you’ll be left with just the basics. To give you an example I’ve already mentioned before, a while back I had an automation that turned the bathroom lights blue when I got up to shower if it was going to rain that day… sounds useful, right? Well, it’s as silly as they come. If it’s going to rain that day, you already found out days earlier through the thousand weather inputs we have: the phone app, the smartwatch, your neighbor’s comment in the elevator, or that knee they operated on that aches when rain’s coming… it rarely catches us by surprise. Not to mention the guy who had his Hue bridge connected to IFTTT so it would turn his home lights Barça blue-and-red whenever Barça scored a goal… well, the fellow complained that IFTTT notified him too late and he’d hear the neighbor celebrating the goal before his lights even changed, so he went looking for a similar service with less lag. Super useful. I’ve decided I’m going to put together another installment for you with some of my HomeKit notifications, sort of a part two, so this time let’s focus only on Automations and Scenes created from the Home app and from Shortcuts, no Controller for HomeKit or anything like that. Alright, let’s get into it.

Ambiences and Scenes

Keep in mind that I really like using ambiences or scenes. I find it more useful than creating an automation with everything that needs to happen, especially if it can be reused or triggered manually. This needs a bit of thought, because you could have an automation that turns off all the lights at 11:30 PM… but you might actually want it as an Ambience so you can run it anytime from your phone or by asking Siri. Plus, it’s much easier to add new accessories to an Ambience: if you have that automation to turn off all the lights and tomorrow you buy a new bulb, you have to go into the automation and add the accessory. If the automation simply triggers the Scene, you just have to edit the scene to add the new bulb, saving yourself a bunch of clicks. If you end up creating an ambience or scene, you also need to think carefully about the name, because at some point you might ask Siri for it. Saying ‘Hey Lola, run Kids Lights and Music ON’ is not the same as saying ‘Hey Lola, wake up the kids’ to trigger an Ambience called ‘Wake up the kids’ that turns on the lights and plays music through the HomePods. The other day, during a Home Automation Consultation with Luis, a guy from the Telegram group who’s quite the rascal, he told me he has an Ambience called Make Me Fall in Love that turns the lights red and switches on the smart plug for the record player (yes, record player) where he’s got an Eros Ramazzotti album loaded… And of course, to run it he just has to say ‘Hey Lola, make me fall in love!’. Luis, if you’re reading this, I recommend adding the Nuki lock to that Ambience so it locks the door, so you don’t end up like that time we were talking and your mom showed up at the house. Other times, the automation calls a Shortcut instead. As you know, when we’re choosing devices within an Automation, we can scroll all the way down and tap Convert to Shortcut to add conditions, variables, or whatever we need. Which is really handy for setting up conditions. You can’t add conditions to an Ambience because it can’t be converted into a Shortcut. Keep in mind that Siri is smarter now than before. Before, if you said ‘Hey Lola, turn on the living room’, it would turn on every device you had in the living room, even a smart plug or the air conditioner. It simply switched everything ON. Now, if you say ‘Hey Lola, turn off the living room’, it knows it should turn off the lights, leaving the rest of the devices untouched. You can also say ‘Hey Lola, turn off the living room lights’, of course… but the other way saves you 2 words! And that’s breath you can save for other things.

Some Automations

One of the automations you all ask me about most is the one I sometimes mention: ‘and when we leave the Community of Madrid, the boiler turns off’. The most typical question is how you define «the Community of Madrid.» If you go to the Home app and create a new automation of the ‘When leaving’ type, by default the Location field shows Home. But if you tap on that, you can change it from Home to, say, Madrid, and then Madrid shows up with the classic little circle so you can widen the radius. In my case, that radius is 31 kilometers to cover the whole city of Madrid and its surroundings, so that when we step outside the circle, the ‘Away from home’ ambience runs: the boiler shuts off completely, any lights left on turn off, and the door locks itself. This automation can be tweaked to turn on a light to simulate presence, but I actually don’t do that with the ‘Away from home’ automation, since I only use that one if we’re going to be out for the day or something like that… but I have another ambience called ‘We’re on vacation’ that runs not when we leave home via the ‘When leaving’ automation, but with an ‘On arrival’ automation in Valencia, where, as I’ve mentioned before, I have a summer apartment. Also, in the Home app I have other automations for that apartment, so that when I arrive in Valencia, the electric water heater turns on and, if it’s cold, a couple of heaters in the apartment switch on too. Needless to say, if it’s summer and the temperature isn’t low, only the water heater turns on. It’s also very important to add every family member’s devices to the Home app. My phone leaving the Community of Madrid is relatively common—sometimes I’ve got a work trip, a class at the Valencia Polytechnic, or whatever. If my wife’s phone leaves too, that’s a different story, but even then it could just be a romantic getaway (remember, kids, how important it is to keep the spark alive as a couple and do things just the two of you), with the kids staying home with a babysitter or the grandparents, so that condition still isn’t the same as if every device belonging to the family leaves the Community of Madrid. You might be a bit reluctant to add the kids to the Home app so they don’t go around annoying each other by turning off their sibling’s light while they’re in the bathroom or reading. But you can invite them to the Home app and, once they’ve accepted from their device, delete the Home app from their phone, so the permission stays granted and their device’s location is taken into account, but they can’t interact with the lights… unless they reinstall the Home app, of course. In every room I have a few common Ambiences. For example, to turn the lights on or off, although now you can also tell Siri ‘Hey Lola, turn off the kids’ room lights’ and it knows exactly which lights to turn off, no problem. Besides that, I have another Ambience called ‘Little Lamps’ that, when I say ‘Hey Lola, turn on little lamps’, turns on all the lamps in the house at 60%. At home we really like keeping lights on for ambiance, always warm light and never at full blast… and we almost never turn on the ceiling lights. Remember what we talked about a few days ago regarding that typical outlet that only gets used once a year for the Christmas tree? We can use it as a control device even if it has nothing plugged into it. We can create an automation linked to the iCloud vacation calendar, which we’ve mentioned before, so that if there’s something on the vacation calendar, it simply won’t run the «turn on the lights at 8» actions even if it’s a weekday. It’s a simple condition. But we can also have a smart plug that, when switched on, prevents the «turn on the lights at 8 AM» actions from running even on weekdays. Besides these, I have the typical automations everyone probably has, but always with conditions. For example, I have a door-open sensor on the entryway closet where the jackets are kept. That closet is a bit dark, so when it’s opened, the entryway light turns on so you can see which jacket to grab. As soon as the closet closes, a 4-minute countdown starts so you have time to leave the house, and then it turns off. But this light only turns on if it’s not the middle of the night! If you get home at 4 AM and open the jacket closet, no light turns on, because it could shine into the kids’ rooms while they sleep with the door slightly ajar and wake them up… so if you stumble in drunk at 4 AM, tough luck—you leave your jacket on the entryway coat rack and put it away properly the next morning. Then I have some sillier automations, like one that turns off the small bathroom’s heater (the kids’ one) 15 minutes after it’s been switched on, because they often leave the bathroom and forget it running… and that same automation also turns it off if the light gets switched off for the same reason, because sometimes they leave both the light and the heater on!! My dad would have had a fit, since every extra kilowatt my brother and I wasted used to drive him nuts. I think it’s a flaw that kicks in for all of us guys once we get older. There are also the typical automations like turning on some lights 15 minutes before sunset. Turning on the entryway lamp if the front door opens in the middle of the night so you don’t walk in in the dark, and it turns itself off again after a few minutes. The automation I’ve mentioned before for going out for a run, which turns on the bathroom heater starting at 7:30 if I’m nearby and the living room is under 16 degrees. Another one so that when I go running at 6:30, it turns off the living room and kitchen lights once the front door closes… Or one I have that activates Movie mode at 10:30 PM and dims the living room lights to 50% whenever the TV or the Apple TV is on, since if it’s nighttime and the lamp is on but the TV isn’t, that means I’m working on my computer here where you usually see me, or my wife is reading or something, but we don’t want the lights to dim in that case—so if the TV is off, the lights stay at 100%.

Personal Automations

Oh, I also have one of those Personal Shortcuts that might interest you. As you know, Personal shortcuts run from our own device, not from the Home Hub, but that lets us automate actions that we can’t do from the Home app. For example, I have a personal automation so that when my phone starts charging at night, the living room light turns off, it waits 4 minutes, then turns off my bedside lamp, since that means I’m heading to bed. But this automation has 2 chained IF conditions, so that if the living room TV is on (it’s an LG that’s HomeKit-compatible) or the Apple TV in the living room is on, that means I’ve gone to bed but someone else is still watching TV, in which case the living room lamp doesn’t turn off. Anyway, I hope I’ve given you some ideas. As you can see, the most important thing for me is being able to combine automations with Ambiences whenever they might need to be triggered outside the usual schedule for whatever reason, and making sure every automation includes conditions, because even though it might seem like we lead pretty structured lives and do the same thing every day, once you set up strict time-based automations you’ll realize that every day is the same, but some days are more the same than others.