Homes, Rooms, and Zones in Apple HomeKit
It may seem like setting up Homes, Rooms, and Zones in HomeKit is overkill in the sense that digitally organizing your smart home seems unnecessary. However, doing this in HomeKit gives you access to a lot of powerful features and a whole new set of Siri commands, allowing you to control multiple devices at once.
Homes
Most people only have one home, but if you have a vacation home or something else, there is support in HomeKit to have multiple homes. In order to access the “Homes” menu, just click on “Homes” in the ConnectSense app. A really important thing to note is that if you have multiple homes, only the home that you have set as the primary home will be used for the Siri voice commands.
Rooms
Along with creating home controls, you can also control individual rooms. You are going to want to create rooms for any place in your house where you have HomeKit devices. You can access the “Rooms” menu under the “Home” menu in the ConnectSense app in order to see any rooms that you have created. If you want to add a new room for your home, simply click the “+” button in the top right corner of your screen, and then you can add a name for your room. After this, you can select which devices you want to go into that room. Complete this step by clicking save.
Zones
Once you have set up rooms, you can proceed to set up zones. Zones are essentially groups of rooms within your home environment. Examples of this could be an upstairs zone, a downstairs zone, a basement zone, or any other way you want to subdivide the rooms of your home. The “Zones” menu can be accessed from the “Homes” menu in the ConnectSense app. If you click on the “Zones” menu, you can see any zones you have created thus far. If you want to add a new zone to your home, click the “+” button in the top right corner of the screen, just as you did in the “Rooms” menu. From here you can give the zone a name and select which rooms you want to belong to that zone. Remember to click save after you have selected each room.
Siri Examples
Now that you have set up various rooms and zones, you can begin to utilize the Siri voice commands associated with these features. An example of a Siri command that would control a room would be something along the lines of, “Siri, turn off the lights in the master bedroom.” This command would turn off your HomeKit device controlling the lights in the room you named the “master bedroom.”
An example of a Siri command that would control a zone would be something like, “Siri, turn off all devices upstairs.” This command would turn off all of your HomeKit devices in the zone you named “upstairs.”
In addition to commands like these, there are also commands that allow you to check if you left the lights on in a room or zone. A command like this would look be, “Siri, did I leave any lights on upstairs?” Siri will be able to tell you the number of lights you have left on in the zone you named “upstairs.”
Now that we’ve learned about the power of your favorite HomeKit app, be sure to set up the rooms and zones in your home.
What are some things that you would want to have automated in your home and have not pulled the trigger on? There are plenty of possibilities. Comment below!