Around my city, Halloween almost brings out as many “all in” people as Christmas when it comes to decorations. In fact, one house near me starts setting up in August and then keeps it going through Christmas, just dressing the Halloween-themed skeletons in Santa hats to carry them into the next holiday. If you’re still turning on all of your Halloween decorations manually, it’s time to automate that using HomeKit.
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HomeKit Weekly is a series focused on smart home accessories, automation tips and tricks, and everything to do with Apple’s smart home framework.
Required HomeKit gear
To get started, you’ll need a HomeKit hub (Apple TV or HomePod). While you can control devices without one at home, having a HomeKit hub lets you run automations and control everything remotely. Standard HomeKit smart plugs are the easiest way to go for indoor gear like light-up pumpkins or window lights. Once connected, you can turn decorations on or off with Siri, the Home app, or automations. I like to set mine to turn on right as it gets dark. In your automations for HomeKit, you can choose sunset as when they come on as well. HomeKit uses the location of your home to determine local sunset and sunrise times.
For outdoor Halloween decorations, you’ll want outdoor-rated smart plugs. These are designed to handle rain, moisture, and colder temps, so they’re safe to use with strobe lights, fog machines, or that giant ghost that you blow up in your front yard to make a statement that your house is the best. Setup is identical to the indoor ones: plug the decoration into the smart plug, then plug the smart plug into the outlet, and add it to HomeKit.
If you have a bunch of outdoor Halloween accessories that you have to go out and manually turn on/plug up every night, just getting a few of these adaptors will be worth its weight in gold. Setup once, build the automations, and then you can use them for Halloween and Christmas.
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Creating automations and scenes
Here is a simple step by step to turn everything on at sunset and then off at 11:00 PM using the Home app.
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