Do this NOW to keep your Apple Home running smoothly

Like pretty much anything else in your home, if you don't keep your smart home cleaned up and tidy, it's going to quickly catch up with you and just start causing lots of problems and getting more confusing. So in this video, I'll show you what I do regularly to clean up my Apple home because it needs it right now. And thanks to Acara for sponsoring this video. More on them and some cool Apple home integrations there in just a minute. And stay tuned to the end of the video where we'll get to some new stuff. I'm trying to make my home better for Siri AI. So starting off on the main screen of your home, there's different devices that you'll see kind of start to show up as you add them there. And there's two reasons they could show up there. Either they're a favorite or they've been what's called added to your home view. But you'll notice if I go into settings, I have this option to add to home view. And if I uncheck that, you won't see that camera on the main screen. And I actually think it's good to keep a limited number of cameras here on this main home screen, because that means that you're going to be able to see more of the image of the important cameras. And then you can look at all the cameras you have just by going a level deeper. So I tend to like just having my front door and my garage. Now, going down to scenes, these actually behave a little bit different. Now, these are what I think of as Apple home's most important feature. And this is not anything super unique to Apple home. But it's the idea that you can control a bunch of accessories all at once, set a bunch of lights and other devices a particular way for something you want to do. It could be triggered by an automation. It could be triggered manually or with a smart button. And to change which of these show up here in the home view, you can long press on them and then you'll see an option for remove from home view. So I'm going to remove that from the home view. And then if I tap here into the scenes menu, I can choose to add to home view. And then if I press that, it will add it to the home view. So you'll see bedtime showing up there. Maybe I want my dinner with music scene showing up. So I hit add to home view and then it will show up right here, my favorite scenes. So then you have a section on your home screen called favorites. And oftentimes when you add new accessories, they'll want to be here in the favorites list. So I have my security system here. I can go ahead and go to accessory settings and you'll see there's add to home view. Now, that just means it'll show up in the home view under the room that it's in, in this case, the dining room. But I can also choose if it's included in favorites. So if I toggle off favorites on my security system, you'll see it's no longer here in the top favorites. This could be a nice way to surface important devices in your smart home for other people in your home. And that's where we get to one of the most important devices to automate in your smart home. And that's your thermostat and the sponsor today's video, Aqara and their W200. Getting your Apple home set up for Apple's adaptive temperature is where Aqara's tech comes in, which is why they're sponsoring this part of the video. One of the things you might not have realized about the Aqara FP300 is that you can use it as a present sensor and a remote temperature sensor for an Aqara W200 thermostat. Chances are the temperature right by your thermostat is not the temperature you have in other parts of your home. By adding an FP300, it combines with the present sensor of the W200 to know if I'm upstairs or downstairs. Of course, if I'm not by either present sensor, it will default back to the sensor it's set to, in this case, the thermostat. What this actually means is our bedroom doesn't get overheated on those hot summer nights when our air conditioning would otherwise just be cooling based on the colder temperature downstairs. You can also set your thermostat to average the temperature across all compatible Aqara temperature sensors across your AC or heating zone to get a better reading on the temperature across a bigger area. Aqara also recently sent me their special W200 with a matte screen that is now available exclusively at Best Buy and Home Depot. My thermostat is in direct line of the sun through the afternoon, which makes any reflective screen pick up some glare. Like the nanotexture option on a lot of Apple screens, this Aqara W200 matte display is great to help for visibility in direct light. The Aqara W200 is also the key part for supporting Apple's adaptive temperature. I find this to be the best way to control your home temperature manually or on a smart schedule. With school starting as our family is all the way from home during a day, away mode kicks in and we can save money by automatically raising the cooling temperature. This means the air conditioning doesn't need to run as much and saves us money. Apple is smart enough to know not only our location, but also predict arrival with adaptive temperature. So we don't come home to a hot home. After setting this up in Apple's Home app, I can quickly monitor my W200 from Apple's control center and adjust it if I want. I recently put the Aqara W200 on products I get if I started a smart home from scratch. And these are just a few of the reasons why. To learn more about temperature automation with Aqara's smart thermostat W200 and the present sensor FP300, check out the links at the top of the description. Thanks again to Aqara for sponsoring this video. Now, if I scroll down here to look at the different rooms I have in my home, you'll see different accessories, but you actually won't see everything. So let's say in the entryway, maybe I've already automated the closet light, so I don't need that light to show up in the entryway. So I can long press on that light, go into settings, and you'll see it's obviously not included in my favorites, but it's toggled on for add to home view. If I turn that off, then you won't see that option in the entryway. Another thing is you may or may not want the front door lock here. So I can go here and say include in favorites, so it's easy to access at the top, but maybe I don't care about it down below in the entryway room. So I can remove it from my home view. Now, if I go over to this tab, this is one that I really need to do, which is looking through my automations on the automation tab and seeing which of these actually don't have any accessories anymore. Because if you add an accessory to Apple Home, let's say like a light switch or a smart plug, and then you add it to an automation, and then later on you remove that smart plug, let's say maybe just to factory reset the smart plug, repair it to your home to solve another troubleshooting issue. Well, then those automations you had it tied to no longer have that smart plug in the automation. And so you do that enough and you'll have a bunch of automations that don't have any accessories in them or that are just sitting there disabled, and you don't really need them cluttering up your automation screen anymore. So I'm going to go here and see this 630 AM daily automation from who knows when I set this, and it has nothing in it. So I can go ahead and delete that automation, and it's going to go ahead and remove that. I actually have a couple of these. And this just simplifies your automation tab, makes it easier to find what you're looking for. Now, the next thing I like to do is go through each room. And if there's nothing in the room, then you can just go ahead and delete it. But you can do that under room settings and then remove the room. Another detail that I like is having zones. So I assign every room a zone. And for me, I break those down by the floors in my home. Then you can talk to Apple's voice assistant and ask it to change all the lights in a particular floor all at once. So I frequently will ask my voice assistant on a HomePod to turn off the lower level lights, which is basically our basement and the other rooms that are in our basement, or turn off the downstairs lights. And that's all the lights around our downstairs. And the nice part about this is if you just go through and take the effort to create zones and then assign each room to a zone, then any lights or accessories you add or remove from that zone are already included in those kinds of requests. Another thing you can do in the room view, you go to the edit room view, and then that will make everything jiggle. And you can then move these to whatever makes sense. This way, your most important scenes are towards the front of the list, and you can do the same with your different lights, and they'll just all rearrange. Now, Apple does break down devices by category, and those sections can't really change. Two other details on rooms. One is that I like to create a hub room. And this doesn't usually have a lot of accessories in it by default, and this room is also not assigned a zone in my home so that it doesn't get lumped into a particular floor of my home. But if I go into my home settings, you'll see under my home hubs and bridges that all the different hubs that I have talking to my Apple Home from other systems like Philips Hue, Home Assistant, Homey, Flick, Acara. The hub for those are put in the hub room, with the exception of maybe something like my W200 thermostat, which of course, that is in the living room where it actually is. But this way, sometimes I see bugs with Apple Home, where it will take a ton of accessories from around your home and just forget which room they're in, and then put them back in the room where the hub is. And that way, if that happens, they're all put into one hub room where it's easy to find them, and that way you don't inadvertently turn on lights in your house just because you tell your voice assistant, turn on the dining room lights, and your hub also happens to be in the dining room, and it happened to, without you noticing, move a bunch of your lights back to the dining room. And so then you're turning on a bunch of extra lights in your home just when you just want the dining room lights on. And this can be really annoying and a really weird bug. Hopefully this stops happening in the future, but using a hub room prevents it from ever being a problem for you. We talked about arranging the room view earlier, but on this home view, you can also reorder the sections. So if you want your favorites above your cameras for some reason, or you want the garage up by the living room, you can do that. Now, I tend to like to keep my rooms grouped by floor with the downstairs first, then the upstairs, and then the lower level. Then if I check this and go back to the top, you'll see that I have my favorites above my cameras. Another one I like to go through and check on is the names of accessories, because chances are a lot of rooms are going to have ceiling lights or main lights or a lamp. It's tough to give anything a unique name across your home unless you include the room name in the name of the accessory. So if I go here to my main lights in the garage, you'll see that I haven't done this yet. It just says main lights. So if someone goes to my home and asks to turn on the main lights, they might be in some other part of the house. But then my helpful voice assistant from the HomePod thinks, OK, I'll turn on the lights called main lights. Seems like a logical choice, but not what the person's asking for. So in this case, I'm going to go ahead and add garage here. And that means that it's called the garage main lights, which helps with the context of it. And if I close this, you'll see that it's still called main lights and a lot of other HomeKit apps will do the same. It's generally treated as the main lights, but then the actual name of the accessory is garage main lights. And it's also easier when you're just trying to find these lights in a long list of accessories, maybe setting up some kind of automation somewhere, then you know that these are the main lights in the garage and not something else. Now, another one that I always have a long list of and need to deal with, and it's a little bit of stuff outside of the app more than inside the app. If you go to the three dots menu, it'll surface issues at the top. And this will show all your devices that are unresponsive in your home. Now, these might be just out of battery, like my Eve motion sensor in my stairs. I have been meaning to change the battery on that and just haven't had a chance. There's also things in here that I really should just remove from my Apple Home because they're just creating confusion and it makes scenes and automations fail because those don't respond. And I really should just get rid of them in my home if they're not responding and not working. So I can just choose remove accessory and that's going to remove these blinds, which have not been working for a while in my home. Now, I'm not going to get into why I'm not blaming the company. I'm not going to, you know, single this company out, but just going to go ahead and remove those blinds and so I have a little more cleaning up to do here with these issues, but hey, I got two less issues to deal with. Now, another thing in this three dots menu that's important to check out are the home settings. So in this, you can give your home a name and then also add or remove people who should be added to your Apple Home. That's always good to review. The other thing here is you can review guests. Now, these are guests that have a HomeKit code for a lock. So if you've added someone with Apple HomeKey, then that numeric code will still work on your locks. Maybe you want to update those, change those, add some more. Another detail you might want to consider turning on is activity. This will allow your home to save activity of when doors open and close, when locks lock and unlock and other security events. And Apple might enhance this over time, but it just gives you a nice record of what's been going on your home for the past month or then, you know, you leave the house and you forget to lock the door and you didn't have auto lock on for some reason, right? Well, then at least you could check the activity log and notice, hey, no one opened the front door while I was gone. So yes, I'll make sure I lock the door next time, but at least no one got in that I can tell in the meantime. Of course, HomeKit secure video cameras are a whole other thing to get into for checking on status like that, but that's really a topic for another video. Although one thing I will get to with the new updates coming in iOS 27 and all the related releases is if you're in a home that's already been upgraded where the main Home Hub and related Home Hubs are all on the 2027 releases, you'll see a new option in the settings for Apple Intelligence. And this allows you to turn on summarizing videos and you can choose which cameras and which language you prefer for the summaries. And this will use Apple Intelligence to look at the video clip and determine what was going on then and then give you a written description. And this way you can quickly get back to particular videos, maybe of the raccoon in your yard last night that you want to see and share with someone. And don't forget to go through your photo library and label faces for yourself, your family and friends so that your cameras can recognize those people. Another cool thing that Apple Intelligence does here is reduce notifications. So I've been testing this with the betas over the summer and it's really nice. You get less notifications for things like cameras, changing modes when you arrive or leave a particular place. As these notifications roll into your device, your device will combine the notifications together into something that makes sense, telling you what's going on in your home. So for me, a lot of times as I arrive here at my studio, that is an Apple Intelligence 2027 test area for me, it will just tell me a notification of Eric arrived at the office or Eric left the office. And then it won't tell me, oh, the floor camera changed modes and the other office camera changed modes. It's not going to give me like a bunch of notifications. It just all comes in with one notification. So small detail, but a nice upgrade. And the last thing on Siri AI is that any kind of AI system these days is really only as good as the data and the context you're able to give it. And wouldn't it be great if you had this helpful assistant on your devices that not only knew about your smart home, but also knew and could reference all kinds of things about all the devices in your home. And that's where I think creating a folder of manuals of all the products you have in your home, or at least the ones that really matter, then you can use Siri AI to find random stuff in those home manuals. So I haven't been using this a ton yet, but I have been collecting those manuals and Siri AI is able to search them and find details. For your Ryobi 18v1 plus HP advanced stick vacuum, model PBL-SIV719, you can use the Ryobi replacement HEPA filters, two pack, part number eight. I think over time, this could become really helpful and isn't directly smart home related, but is about helping your smart devices help you manage your home and hopefully fix your vacuum. Give this video a thumbs up if you liked it. It really does help more people find this video in the channel. Subscribe to my channel if you aren't already for more videos on Apple and smart home tech. Thanks to Acara for sponsoring. You can check out links to their stuff at the top of the description. And YouTube has a video over here that is something else for my channel. I think you might like. Thanks again so much for watching and I hope to see you in the next video.