HomeKit Weekly: Having remote access to unlock your door and disable your security system is a smart home superpower
It’s getting close to summer and summer traveling here in the U.S., and I was recently reminded how beneficial remote access to your smart home accessories could be. This week I will be explaining how you can access your smart home accessories when you are away and what the possible uses might be.
HomeKit Weekly is a series focused on smart home accessories, automation tips and tricks, and everything to do with Apple’s smart home framework.
In the summer of 2020, we had our hardwood floors redone after a tornado landed a big tree on our house, and the accompanying rain poured in to my living room. Our hardwood floors took on a decent amount of water, so a large section of it had to be replaced, and the entire first floor had to be refinished. This entire project took a week as the floors had to be sanded down and re-stained. It’s part of building a house, but it can be a hassle in an existing one. It also requires the removal of all furniture from the space. We planned to do it while we were gone on vacation to avoid needing to stay in a hotel for a week.
Remote access to the rescue
The person that was redoing our floors is a family friend, so I trusted him in my home while I was not there, but I wanted an easy way to lock the door and set the alarm system. Thanks to my existing HomeKit setup, we had that option. I was already using the August Lock and abode alarm system. Remote access is possible with both the HomeKit or native apps of these products.
If you have products that you want to access remotely that don’t allow for native remote access, you’ll want to make sure you have a HomeKit home hub installed in your home. A HomeKit home hub can be a HomePod, HomePod mini, Apple TV, or an always plugged-in iPad (Check out this iPad wall mount setup for HomeKit.) If you have at least one of these devices on your network, you’ll have full access to your HomeKit environment when away from your home. If you really want to put it into use, you can flip your lights off and on at random times while you’re gone to really trick would-be burglars.
Let’s say that you have a HomeKit-only alarm system not tied to a monitoring station, but you want to disable it remotely for someone to enter – this is a situation where a HomeKit home hub will come in handy.
When you’re designing a smart home setup, you’ll want to think about situations where you want to let someone in remotely. In our situation, I knew the floor crew was coming at 8:00 a.m., so at 7:50 a.m., I’d unlock the door, disable auto-lock on the door, and disable the alarm. After I received the notification from my eufy camera that the crew was leaving the driveway at night, I would lock the front door and activate the alarm.
Wrap up
We’re using the same set-up for building our house: an August Lock with Wi Fi at our side and an abode security with central station monitoring. The home building process has led to me rethinking what benefits HomeKit brings to my life, and it’s clear that the ability to unlock your doors remotely while disabling your security system is very beneficial to have when the need comes up.