HOW TO Create your first automation

1 Add automation

Open the Home app on your iPhone, iPad or Mac (we’re using the iPhone app here) and you’ll see an overview of all the smart devices on your home network. Tap “+” in the top– right corner, then tap Add Automation from the menu.

2 Event suggestions

You’ll now see the New Automation window with five options under Events: People Arrive; People Leave; A Time of Day Occurs; An Accessory is Controlled and A Sensor Detects Something. Select “A Time of Day Occurs”.

3 Choose time & day

In the following Time Automation window, you can now select when you would like the automation to occur. You can choose Sunrise, Sunset, or select a specific time. You can also choose on which days you’d like the automation to repeat.

4 Use people power

Here we’ve set for the automation to occur every day at sunset. But you can also add another condition: People. Tap People and you’ll see three options: Off, When I am home, and When I am not at home. We’ll explain why in the next step.

5 Present and correct

If you set the People option to “When I am home”, any device conditions you set will only occur when you are present. So, for example, instead of the lights coming on automatically at sunset, they’ll only switch on when you’re actually at home.

6 Set the scene

Tap Next and you’ll now be able to either choose a scene if you have any (these enable you to control multiple accessories at once), or specific devices in certain rooms. Here we’ve chosen a smart light in our living room named “Nanoleaf Light Strip”. Tap Next.

7 Set your accessory

You’ll now see that we’ve set the event to occur only at sunset, and only when we’re at home. Under Accessories, you’ll see the light we’ve chosen. Tap its item under Accessories and its status will change from Turn Off to Turn On.

8 Add a Turn Off time

The light will now turn on using the criteria we’ve set — but it won’t switch off, unless we set it to.

Tap the Turn Off option that’s now appeared and scroll through the list of options. Here we’ve set the light to turn off “After 4 hrs”.

6 Test the event

Now we need to see whether the event we’ve created works. Tap Test This Automation and the light should switch on. If the automation does what you expect it to (i.e. the light switched on), tap Done. The event will be added to Automations.