HomeKit Weekly

I have been eyeing the OneLink Safe and Sound for a few months now, and I decided to pull the trigger a few weeks ago and see what it’s like in day to day use. My house is seven years old, so I’ll be looking to replace all of the smoke detectors in the next few years, so if I wanted to go for a smart home route, I wanted to have time to spread out the purchases.
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HomeKit excels as a platform because it allows you to tie together multiple products from different manufacturers across your home. This reality will enable you to use a motion sensor on one side of your house to trigger a light from a different manufacturer somewhere else in your home. My biggest complaint about HomeKit is that I have a string of third-party manufacturer’s apps on iPhone that are solely used for firmware updates. What should Apple do to fix this?
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When “HomeKit buttons” came out a few years ago, I initially laughed them off. My thought was if I wanted to press a physical button to turn on my lights, I’d use the regular light switch. That thought was before I aggressively expanded my HomeKit use cases. Like with anything related to smart homes, it’s not about tying an individual action to an automation, but rather tying devices together. While I love using Siri via HomePod to activate scenes, after thinking through our routines, I realized a physical button might make sense in our daily lives. Is the Eve Button a useful device for a HomeKit home? Let’s dig into what it can do.
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When I open the AmpliFi app on my iPhone, I see 50 devices. The majority of them are HomeKit enabled devices, and I’ve recently become obsessed with a product line that needs HomeKit compatibility. It’s led me to think about what I’d like to see added to Apple’s supported categories for HomeKit in the future. Would you buy a HomeKit vacuum?
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After I reviewed the eufyCam 2 and Netatmo cameras, I got several emails asking why I am so passionate about HomeKit Secure Video when it has had a somewhat of a buggy/slow rollout. Rather than respond to each person individually, I thought it would be better to write about why HomeKit Secure Video matters, and why I think it’s a fundamental part of the HomeKit experience. Before you invest in a home camera platform, you need to consider long term security.
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When 2020 started, I didn’t have a single camera in my HomeKit setup, but as the year as gone on, I’ve been picking up cameras left and right. After deploying multiple eufyCameras around the exterior of my house, I turned my attention to covering parts of the interior of my house. While HomeKit Secure Video is essential for outside of the house, it’s required for the inside of my house. It’s one thing for a company to have views on the outside of my house, but only I want to be able to see what’s going on inside my house. End to end encryption is required for any indoor cameras that I use in my house. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been testing out the Netatmo Indoor Camera with HomeKit Secure Video.
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A few months ago, I wrote about the VOCOlinc power adaptor. It’s my favorite low-cost HomeKit outlet adapter. I recently needed a surge protector with each individual to be able to be a HomeKit switch. I again turned to the VOCO branded of products with their HomeKit surge protector.
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In my time watching the HomeKit market, the most strange thing about it is how few HomeKit enabled doorbells there are on the market. It seems like every few months a new doorbell with HomeKit support is announced that never seems to be released. We also continually see products that claim HomeKit support is coming, but the software update never arrives. Where are all the HomeKit doorbells, and is it worth waiting on before making a purchase? This week, I want to look at the Eufy doorbell.

HomeKit Weekly is a series focused on smart home accessories, automation tips and tricks, and everything to do with Apple’s smart home framework.

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One of the things that Amazon has done well with Alexa is cloud-enabled skills that are directly connected to its Echo products. In my smart home setup, we have a couple of Echo Dots in my kid’s rooms they use for ‘story time’ at night. I love my HomePod, but it can’t replace this functionality at this time. Is it time for Apple to build a HomeKit skills section that runs directly off iCloud?
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One of the areas of my HomeKit lighting setup that I ignored for a long time was outdoors. We honestly didn’t have a real need until recently when we got a new puppy. If you’ve ever had a puppy, you know that a lot of time is spent outdoors trying to train the dog to use the bathroom outside. It became clear that we didn’t have enough outdoor lightning when we were taking her out late at night and early in the morning. Like any smart home fanatic would do, I looked at solving this problem without the use of a costly electrician and add HomeKit support in the process. This week, I am going to explain my outdoor HomeKit lighting setup.
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As much as I have been investing in my HomeKit setup over the past few years, HomeKit security cameras are something I hadn’t been able to pull the trigger on. My hesitation is that I didn’t want to be tied to paying monthly fees for each camera, nor did I want a solution that required a cloud service that wasn’t end-to-end encrypted. For my HomeKit cameras, I ended up using the eufyCam 2 thanks to it the option of local recording to a base station, no monthly fees, HomeKit integration, battery-powered and the possibility of using HomeKit Secure Video. Let’s dig into my eufyCam 2 review.
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As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’ve been a Nest customer for the past seven years. I put it a second-generation Nest when I built my house back in 2013, and I added a second Nest a few years later for our upstairs unit. I’ve been using the Starling Home Hub for the past six weeks to enable HomeKit support on these products, but I recently swapped out my downstairs Nest with the ecobee SmartThermostat. After a few weeks of using it, I am ready to compare them and decide which unit has the best HomeKit integration. ecobee vs. Nest: what’s the best smart thermostat?
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In the past few years of building up my collection of HomeKit products, I would tell people that the value of HomeKit is the ability to bring multiple products from multiple manufacturers into a single application that makes it easy to use. After installing my abode alarm system a few weeks back, something clicked for me. As I was settings up my automations, it clicked in my brain that the true benefit of HomeKit is to leverage automations from all of the devices exposed in your HomeKit ecosystem.
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We’re all getting stir crazy being stuck in our houses during the COVID–19 pandemic, but you can make good use of the time if you want to work on your HomeKit setup. Since pretty much every extracurricular activity has been canceled, spend this time getting your house to work for you through Apple’s HomeKit platform. Here are some fun projects that can help pass the time, along with being fun to install.
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Since I’ve started writing a weekly article about HomeKit, one of the most common questions I’ve gotten is exactly what HomeKit products I own and how I use them. I’ve spent years building out each room over time, and I love how easy HomeKit is to manage from any of my devices (including HomePod). If you are starting from scratch on HomeKit, you’ll like this article because it’ll give you a starting point. I am going to explain my “HomeKit home” a room at a time.
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Water leaks are undoubtedly something that can really damage a home. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, we had a water leak in our kitchen that caused our hardwood floors to warp a tad. Particularly with hardwood floors, a water leak can be disastrous. HomeKit enabled water leak detectors are the perfect way to be notified immediately in the event of a water leak. This week, I am going to review the Eve Water Guard to see where it fits within a HomeKit home.
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In my quest to get everything in my home working with HomeKit, I thought it would be time to replace our carbon monoxide detector with a HomeKit compatible one. After doing a bit of research, I settled on the First Alert GLOCO–500 WiFi Environment Monitor with Battery Backup. For a HomeKit carbon monoxide detector, it is exactly what I wanted.
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I’ve been using HomeKit for many years, and one of the things I can’t stop buying is outlet switches. In my house, we tend to use lamps a lot more than overhead lights, so when paired with LED bulbs, they make for an energy-efficient way to shine light in hour home. Over the years, I’ve tried multiple HomeKit compatible outlets, and I’ve finally found one that feels like it was made for HomeKit, and it’s thankfully, the least expensive one I’ve tried. Are you looking for the best HomeKit outlet? Read on to find out more.
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One of the common questions I get is people asking about HomeKit vs. Amazon Alexa. All of these people have iPhones, but they are starting to dabble in the smart home market, so it can be confusing to see the Home app, but then see “works with Alexa” when browsing on Amazon.com. Once you get invested in a platform, it can be difficult and costly to change. So what’s the best smart home platform to get started with in 2020?
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When I moved into my house almost seven years ago, HomeKit hadn’t even been announced yet. What was available at the time was a Nest Thermostat. A friend of mine had one, and he was raving out their energy savings. I had one pre-installed when our main HVAC unit was installed. I eventually added another one to our upstairs unit, and have been very happy with them.

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So much of Apple’s history is tied up between two periods: Pre-iPod and Post-iPod. The iPod took Apple from a computer company, and it set them up to become a consumer electronics company that would go on to become one of the most valuable companies in the world. What most people forget is that the iPod didn’t become the iPod until the iPod mini was released. The original iPod was $399, where the iPod mini had a lower price of $249.

Despite holding including 4GB of storage compared to the 20GB model that the “Classic” introduced that year, the iPod mini is what caused the iPod line to take off. The HomePod is at that exact point in its timeline. The HomePod needs its iPod mini moment. 
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