Over the years I’ve written about various facets of our home automation setup. First we just had a Sonos that started and stopped at set times each day. Then we added a HomePod in our bedroom and started using HomeKit and slowly cobbled together various bits and pieces into our little network. A Hue Bridge to control some light bulbs. A Rain Machine for garden watering had issues playing nicely, and was replaced by a Rachio Controller that recruited some friends to control other things like the tap that fills the water pot outside the kitchen. Other bits rolled in, like the Meross courtyard lights, some Wemo switches to control less traditional things like the moss ball fountain in my office, the Picasso sign, and my cute little Stega light.
For the most part, things worked. There were occasional hiccups, usually due to a needed firmware update or a power cycling of the Hue Bridge. Then a few months ago, the “master” HomePod started having issues. It was a first generation unit reaching its end of life, as updates were difficult and it could not handle multiple Apple accounts adding bits and pieces to control lights, music, garden irrigation, etc. So a couple months back, we tore things apart and started fresh. This time we used a single Apple account to add things to the network, and I also wrote a wiki page (yes we have an internal wiki for this place) where I could catalog the various QR codes and other pertinent information. That way it was easy to remove something and re-add it–especially useful when re-adding it might require a boom-lift.
The end result not only means things work, but future management is easy–and thanks to a monthly reminder, I make sure things are ticking along with no pending updates gumming up the works. Bonus: every day of the week the various automations fire off at set times and just handle things. One automation even turns on various lights (courtyard, garage, great room, and north office) so they are all the same color, and that color varies each day of the week.
So if you are starting down the path of home automation, or even if you have already lit up bits of your home, may advice is to be organized. Document what you do, and save those QR codes in a central location, whether it’s a spreadsheet, wiki page or even just a plain old text file. And if you’re using HomeKit, add things through a single user account as it will save you so many future headaches. Trust me, it was very difficult to actually pull apart our original cobbled-together assortment of devices, but once we managed to disconnect it all, adding things to the new network was easy.