If there’s one thing even better than being able to control your smart home using voice commands, it’s not needing to control your smart home at all. This is possible when you configure smart home devices to make things happen automatically. Let me walk you through the automations I use to make my life easier.
What My Smart Home Setup Looks Like
My own home is almost entirely HomeKit-based, so I’ll use Apple’s Home app for examples, but all smart home platforms support automations. That can be as simple as scheduling lights in Amazon Alexa, or as sophisticated as using the scripting capabilities in Google Home.
The same is true of the devices within your smart home. I’ll be talking about the ones I use personally, but as long as you choose kit that’s compatible with your chosen smart home platform, the specific sensors and devices you use don’t matter.
Presence Detection to Welcome Me Home
Most smart home platforms support presence detection, triggered by a known smartphone coming within range. In HomeKit, for example, tap the “Automation” tab and then use the “When Anyone Arrives Home” trigger.
I have this set to operate between 3 pm and 11 pm, and as I live in an apartment, it simply switches on the entrance lights. It would be possible to also trigger unlocking the front door via presence detection, but personally, that crosses a risk threshold I’m not comfortable with. Anyone who spends a lot of time around technology knows that it can sometimes do unexpected things, doubly so when any form of networking is involved, so I prefer not to risk my home unlocking itself.
If you live in a house, you might also have it trigger a porch light or other external lighting.
Motion Sensors to Switch Lights On and Off
I use Philips Hue Motion Sensors to trigger lighting in the kitchen, bathroom, and wardrobes. All are controlled by the Hue app under Settings > Accessories > Motion Sensors.
When anyone walks into the kitchen, the sensor switches on the Philips Hue Lightstrips used as under-cabinet lighting. That’s the standard lighting I need in the kitchen 95% of the time, so I’m happy to manually activate the spotlights if I want more light. My kitchen is actually an alcove off the living room, so the sensor just sits on a countertop, angled such that it won’t be triggered by anyone walking around the living room.
The bathroom is even more straightforward: there are only ceiling lights, so a sensor on a shelf is triggered by the door opening.
Finally, the wardrobe sensors are fixed to the inside of the wardrobe doors, so opening those triggers the Philips Hue Lightstrips used to light them. Here I have two settings, depending on the time of day. Late at night, it selects a very dim setting so that I have just enough light to hang up a jacket.
When setting up motion-activated lighting in a wardrobe, configure multiple wardrobes as a room so you can easily switch off all the lighting at once.
In all cases, the lights automatically switch off a few minutes after motion ceases. You may need to experiment with both motion sensitivity and timing to find the most reliable approach. Personally, I use a high sensitivity and a short time-out, on the basis that if the lights switch off before I’m done, a simple wave of the hand will switch them on again.
Controlling an Electric Blanket
I’m a big fan of smart plugs, as a really easy way to make the dumbest of devices smart, and that includes a humble electric blanket in the winter. If you go to bed at a fixed time, you might want to schedule a time to switch it on, to pre-warm the bed. My bedtime is too variable for that, but I do use an automation to switch it off at 2 am to ensure that it doesn’t stay on all night if I fall asleep while it’s on.
There’s no convoluted logic involved: if the smart plug is already off, sending another signal to switch it off does no harm, so it’s a simple timed automation. I use Eve Energy smart plugs, but they all work in the same way.
Opening and Closing Blinds
My apartment has Luxaflex Duette smart motorized blinds on all the windows (sold under the Hunter Douglas brand in some countries). They’re controlled by the second-generation bridge, which is HomeKit-compatible, and I have several automations for them.
Working from home, I wake at a very civilized 8 am, so the first automation partially opens the bedroom blind. This lets in enough light to gently wake me, without blinding me. Half an hour later, the blind opens fully. Both automations are triggered on weekdays only.
My apartment faces west, and has floor-to-ceiling windows running the full width of the living room, meaning that in summer things get hot! For that reason, I have an automation that closes the living room blinds at noon (as the sun starts to come around to the front). It then re-opens them at sunset (With Apple’s Home app, you’ll find that in “A Time Of Day Occurs”—both “Sunrise” and “Sunset” are options within this.)
Changing Lighting During Work Hours
I have a home office fitted with a combination of Philips Hue lighting: a color bulb in the ceiling light, and Lightstrips beneath the window sill and attached to the rear of my desk. When it’s time to start work, these switch to a cold and bright light, for concentration. At the end of my working hours, they switch instead to a warmer color temperature and reduced brightness, for a more relaxing feel if I’m remaining at my desk for non-work reasons.
Switching Everything Off When the Last Person Leaves Home
Finally, presence detection is used in reverse, to detect when the last person leaves the home. Again, in the Home app, this is in “Automation” > “When The Last Person Leaves Home.” That switches off all the lights in the apartment.
I have that setting because I live on the 18th floor of an apartment block, so there’s no point in using lights for burglar deterrence: no lights are visible from outside the front door, and any burglar who scales 18 floors of glass walls frankly deserves whatever they can fit into their backpack as they abseil back down.
But if you live in a house, you might choose to have that setting switch on some lights, and perhaps also run a timed automation to switch lights on and off throughout the evening to simulate the presence of someone at home.
The above completes my automations, but there are some others you might find useful, depending on your home and routines. You might also want to consider:
- Switching on a coffee machine or kettle at wake-up time
- Scheduled lawn watering
- Activating a robot cleaner when the last person leaves
- Switching on garage lights when the door opens
- Activating a humidifier when humidity rises (many motion sensors can detect temperature and humidity too)
Looking for a way to use smart home devices from different ecosystems under one roof? Consider the free open-source smart home platform Home Assistant.
