Hello everyone! Hope your week is off to a great start!
Ok, so I have an existing Apple HomeKit setup and I like it, but I don’t like the limitations - BUT (and maybe more importantly) my wife likes the HomeKit setup just fine. My fist thought was to go with Home Assistant - so I tried, but it was a bit more work than I wanted. So I heard about Homey and decided to give that a try. It arrives today, the ethernet adapter arrives Thursday - I plan to spend this weekend trying to get it up and running.
There is another reason I want to do this, but I will ask about that in a separate post.
So here I am asking for advice, tips, suggestions, etc on what the best way would be to go about setting up Homey Pro with an existing HomeKit setup. In HomeAssistant, I was told to delete items from HomeKit and then add them to Home Assistant and then BACK into HomeKIt from HA. Would it be best to do the same with Homey? Should I only do that with SOME of the devices? None of them? In the end, I would like for both my wife and I to still be able to control everything possible from HomeKit and Siri - but I am interested in the advanced automation capabilities (Flows) of Homey.
I am aware of the HomeKit experiment, but I also heard of something called Home Kitty - which one is better? Or is there another option I need to know about?
I have been trying to watch YouTube videos on this topic, but 90% of the videos are from like 1 year of more ago.
EDIT: I just realized this might be helpful:
I have mostly Aqara devices (including the M3 hub and the E1 hub), plus some various matter lightbulbs and smart plugs (mostly Meross, I think) and some Third reality switches and their hub
Not sure about your devices but this has worked for me.
I’d rather have a limited functioning device through homey than a full featured device through home kit. My ecobee thermostats and cameras being the exception. This is because I want homey for automation so it needs to see anything that will trigger an automation or be automated based on a trigger. The large number of community apps is why the big 3 smart homes wont compete with this.
Don’t enable the beta feature homekit experiment. Enable home kitty. This will allow you to select which homey device gets published to apple home kit. Think of it this way: homey is your garage where you tinker. Apple home is the interface for your family and guests. In my case sensors that are used for automation are added to homey but not to homekit. Family needs to turn on / off a light switch or open a door, but not see if a sensor is triggered or not.
So as much as possible, remove devices from apple home and add them to homey to maximize the benefit of the advice above. Where a homey added device will have limited functionality you can’t live with, add it back to home kit directly.
Added bonus: my family can now use google home or apple home equally. Almost everything is in homey (devices and automations), and they use apple/google apps or speakers to interact with the home.
So I like your approach, and I will probably be doing something similar. But I live in an apartment. The management company is very understanding and open minded, so I have been able to install many things I didn’t think I could - I was able to install the Aqara U100 smart lock (which I didn’t expect them to be ok with) and they even installed my Emerson Sensi smart thermostat for me! I also installed the Aqara G4 doorbell, but I was fairly certain they wouldn’t care about that.
I wish Homey would see my thermostat, but so far no luck Google said it would work, but it hasn’t so far. I don’t have a C wire, but in a workaround involving the Starling Hub and Google - I was able to get it into HomeKit!
Anyway, I have something of a Frankenstein setup here, but as much as I can, I will be following your advice
Google said it would work, but it hasn’t so far. I don’t have a C wire, but in a workaround involving the Starling Hub and Google - I was able to get it into HomeKit!
