If I like anything about Siri, it’s the ability to be able to give her voice commands to turn my lights on and off. I’m proud and brag about the environments I’ve set up in HomeKit, something I started doing with smart bulbs from Ikea in my old rental apartment in Barcelona.
But There’s something HomeKit hates: moving. Suddenly everything needs to be rearranged, from smart plugs to any light bulb. This happened to me during a move and after reassembling the pieces, I realized that there were too many bulbs. I didn’t want to remove them from HomeKit, so I resorted to a workaround.
Moving Can Upset Your HomeKit Settings
The old apartment had many warm light spots in all rooms, as there were no ceiling lamps. But I already have them on the ground, so to arrange my warm atmospheres I didn’t need so many smart bulbs
The easiest solution in these cases is to remove these extra bulbs from the Home app, but what happens if I suddenly think of a way to use them? I remembered that I had difficulty reinstalling them, so I preferred to leave them in place.
But of course, those bulbs that you no longer use… in which room of the house do we place them? They’re not plugged in, so it’s absurd. And also, They appear marked with an error because it naturally does not detect them. After reflection, I found a “solution” which ended up convincing me.
An imaginary room and an additional environment
The first thing I did was move all the bulbs I no longer use to a new room. The one that doesn’t really exist, and which I named “Limbo”. What I achieve with this is to clearly differentiate unplugged bulbs from those still in use:
By the way, these bulbs have also been removal of all automation and the environments I automated. So Siri doesn’t tell me there are errors when I try to turn these bulbs and outlets on or off. “Limbo” does not participate in the environments or automation of the house, it is simply there. Saving the “ghost light bulbs”.
There was only one small flaw: I had the habit of telling Siri the command to “turn off all the lights” when leaving the house. But with these unused lights in my “Limbo”, Siri kept apologizing for not being able to turn off all the bulbs. I kept trying to disable unused ones.
To solve what I created a new environment called ‘Off’, where I added only the lights used to turn them off. Moving on to using this environment, Siri no longer complains since it doesn’t need to interact with anything unplugged:
Can there be a better solution? Probably. But it’s the one that best adapted my habits with Siri, and the one that will allow me to quickly retrieve the bulbs left in the “Limbo” in case I find a use for them in the future. A balance between two situations that allows me to continue using HomeKit as before.
Pictures | Generated with Bing/DALL-E
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