There are two schools of thought when it comes to the smart home. The first is that the best way to control all your devices is to have some kind of central hub, such as the upcomingAmazon Echo Hub. One downside of this approach is that you need to be near or next to your control hub when you want to make changes or do everything from your phone or tablet.
In my opinion, the best way to make your home truly smart is through automations. Rather than manually controlling yoursmart home devices, automation allows those products to perform actions without any input from you at all. When a room gets too cold, the heating will respond by itself due to your specific presets. This is when your home becomes truly smart.
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If you’re all in on the Apple ecosystem, it’s possible to create these types of automations using the company’sHome app. You can use temperature and humidity sensors to trigger these automations and have your smart home kit perform all sorts of actions without you having to be involved at all. Best of all, if you have anApple HomePod, you already have temperature and humidity sensors on board. Here’s how to create temperature and humidity automations in the Apple Home app.
What you need to create temperature and humidity automations in the Home app
to create temperature and humidity automations in the Apple Home app, there are a few things you’ll need. Firstly, you’re going to need something to measure the temperature and humidity. There are plenty of smart home sensors out there that can measure temperature, humidity, or both, but you’ll need to be sure that your sensors are HomeKit-compatible, or you won’t be able to use them in your automations. To take full advantage of the possibilities of these automations, you’ll also need some other HomeKit-compatible smart home devices.
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You’ll also need something to act as a smart home hub. This is a device that will act as the command centre, receiving the temperature and humidity data and firing off the appropriate commands to your other smart home devices when the automations are triggered. To work with the Home app, it needs to be an Apple device.
Currently, there are three main options. You can use anApple TV 4K (2021)as an Apple home hub, or anynewer modelthat includes an Ethernet port. You can also use aHomePodor a HomePod mini as a smart home hub. Finally, it’s possible to use an iPad as a home hub, although this isn’t really practical, as it requires your iPad to be always in your home, always powered on, and always connected to your home Wi-Fi. You also can’t use aniPadas a home hub with the new, more reliable Home architecture, so if you’ve already upgraded the Apple Home app, you won’t be able to use your iPad as a home hub at all.
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One of the biggest benefits of using a HomePod or HomePod mini as your home hub is that these devices already have humidity and temperature sensors built in that you may use as part of your automations. That means you don’t need any additional humidity or temperature sensors at all; the HomePod can do it all.
How to create temperature and humidity automation in the Home app
Whether you’re using your HomePod to provide the temperature and humidity readings for your automations, or you’re using other smart home devices, it’s simple to create an automation in the Home app on youriPhone.
Remember that the HomePod will only be able to measure the temperature and humidity of the room that it’s in; if you want to create automations based on the temperature or humidity of other rooms in your home, you’ll need to buy additional sensors, or move your HomePod to the location you want to monitor.
What can I do with a temperature or humidity automation?
The actions you can perform when your temperature or humidity automation is triggered will depend on the other smart home devices that you have connected to your Home app. However, there are some useful things you can create if you have the right kit.
You can get your smart light bulbs to change color based on the current temperature. If your room gets too cold, you can set your bulbs to turn blue, or have them turn red if the room gets too warm.
If you have a dehumidifier, you can attach it to a HomeKit compatiblesmart plugand create an automation that will turn the smart plug on if the humidity gets too high. This is a really useful way to ensure that the humidity doesn’t get too high in a specific room without having to leave the dehumidifier running all the time. You’ll need to set up an additional automation if you want the dehumidifier to turn off when the humidity drops below a certain level.
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There are some useful ways to keep your home at the right temperature, too. you may create a temperature automation that will turn on your smart thermostat when the room gets too cold or turn if off when the room gets too warm. You can also have yoursmart blindsclose automatically if the room is getting to warm, too.
What can’t I do with a temperature or humidity automation?
Frustratingly, it’s not currently possible to run standard Apple shortcuts as an action in your automation. TheConvert To Shortcutoption in the Home app gives you some features, but a lot of the more powerful features of theShortcuts appare inaccessible. It means you’re able to’t do useful things such as sending a notification to your iPhone when the temperature or humidity gets too high.
This makes creating complex automations impossible; hopefully Apple will allow better compatibility with shortcuts in the future. For now, if you want to create really powerful automations that can do almost anything you want, you should take a look at software such as Home Assistant or OpenHAB.
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