Smart home with Apple
Building a smart home if you are in Apple’s ecosystem is both easy and hard at the same time — easy because you already have plenty apple devices that can work for controlling your smart home. Difficult because its still not easy to find accessories that are compatible with Apple HomeKit — apple’s smart home platform. On an average Alexa and Google home compatible smart home accessories are consistently 20–30% cheaper than their counterparts for Apple.
In this article I am going to share how I build by an affordable smart home within the Apple ecosystem over the last couple years.
To get started with smart home all you need is an Apple device like iPhone/iPad and a compatible smart bulb
HomeKit
Apple’s smart home platform is called HomeKit, so this is what you want to check when searching for apple compatible smart home accessories
The hub
Apple’s smart home platform is designed to run locally i.e. you can send commands from your apple device to the smart home accessory if you are connected to the same wireless network without internet. This works great when you are home and want to control your smart home from your phone. However you are only limited to controlling your devices while you are at home. To overcome this limitation you need to add a device that always stays home so it can control the accessories — your “home hub”
In the Apple ecosystem there are 3 devices which can be used as a home hub
- HomePod (standard or mini)
- Apple TV
- iPad (always connected to power)
I started off with an Apple TV 4k, however you can use any of the above devices to get started.
Adding a home hub with Apple has lots of benefits — in addition to allowing you to control your home remotely, it can also detect when you are arriving home or leaving and execute automation based on that.
First steps
Easiest and the most common smart home accessory is lighting. I got started with some LIFX A19 color bulbs — these are the most versatile and one of the brightest bulbs (1100 lumens) available in the market that supports Apple HomeKit in addition to other platforms.
The biggest challenge with setting up a smart home is that for most of us we already have plethora of accessories and it rarely makes sense to replace all of them at the same time. I would recommend you to take stock of what you would like to replace to take a plunge into this. Typically lighting is the easiest and the most abundant place to get started.
Smart Home Lighting
There are few different ways in which you can make your lights smarter.
Outlet — If you have existing lamps that are in good condition and one’s you don’t plan on replacing than you can make them smarter by hooking them up into a smart outlet. Costco has a 2 pack Wemo for $30. Apples Home App allows you to set a custom type for the outlet for a nice app experience.
Bulbs
If you have bulbs ready for replacement you can get started with LIFX A19 Color bulbs 1100 lumens or 800 lumens. These usually go on discount around the holiday shopping season. They are premium quality and typically cost around $45 — $59 per bulb.
Another alternative is FEIT HomeKit bulbs — these are relatively cheaper than the LIFX bulb that come is 800 lumen variant. The FEIT bulb is connected using Bluetooth so you need to ensure that bulb is within the range (usually 30 feet) of your home hub.
Strips
LED light strips are a good addition to enhance the ambience of your home. Typically these work great as reflected lights. Some great options to install them are behind your TV as backlights, shelf unit, couch or desk.
These run on the more expensive side ($70 — $80) and you can get a HomeKit compatible strip lights from LIFX, Philips Hue or Eve.
Bill of parts:
- Homepod Mini — $99
- Outlet (Wemo 2 pack) — $30
- Bulb (FEIT Color 800 lumen 2 pack) — $50
So you can get started with a quick and easy smart home within apple’s ecosystem for $179.
Lets make it affordable
We have way more lights and accessories to replace in the house so the cost really adds on fast. On an average accessories compatible with Apple HomeKit are 30–40% more expensive than accessories for Alexa or Google home. For e.g. FEIT color bulbs for Alexa/Google cost $10 per bulb while the ones for Apple HomeKit cost $25 which is 150% more expensive.
The question I found myself thinking over was, is it time to change my ecosystem? I couldn’t imagine changing my phones or computers so it meant adding another ecosystem from Google or Amazon to my home.
Thinking more deeply I realized that I didn’t want to invest in any particular ecosystem purely on the basis of cost but rather choose best products for my needs so I decided on finding accessories that don’t tie me to a single ecosystem and are affordable enough for me to scale for the entire house.
In my next article I will walk you through my approach on liberating smart home accessories and making a user friendly affordable smart home
