Home Automations allow you to control the devices in your home, automatically. Create complex workflows to make repetitive home tasks effortless. Unlike Personal Automations, these can be run by anyone in the household, but are more limited — with no access to personal information, or services (such as sending messages).
In this How-To we're going to create an automation that turns on a fan when a Temperature sensor detects the current temperature is above 70ºF (~21ºC).
Requirements
- An iPhone or iPad running iOS/iPadOS 13 or later
Using the Home App
Open the Home app on your iPhone or iPad
Step 2
Tap the Automation tab at the bottom
Step 3
Tap the "+" button at the top right, and choose Personal Automation.
Tap the "+" button at the top right, and choose Add Automation.
Using the Shortcuts App
Open the Shortcuts app on your iPhone or iPad
Step 2
Tap the Automation tab at the bottom
Step 3
Tap the "+" button at the top right, and choose Home Automation.
Step 4
You will then have to choose the trigger group, which in our case, is "A Sensor Detects Something":
Step 5
You will then choose the "Wind Down Begins" option — this is your Trigger. Then, tap "Next".
Next you will need to find the sensor you want to use, in my case I'm going to use one of the Temperature Sensors in my Office:
Step 6
Now we have to define our actions, so tap the "Add Action" button and search for "Brightness", until you find "Set Brightness".
Next we want to send the Condition, which for our automation is "Rises Above" and selected the desired temperature, for us 70ºF:
At this point, you could choose to set a time window to restrict when the automation will run, and also whether or not it will run when anyone, or just you, is in the home. This is great for setting up automations that will turn on and off lights at "random" when you're away to make it appear like someone is home. For this example, we're going to leave the defaults, which will run any time and regardless of whether people are at home — to continue, tap "Next".
Step 7
Now we have to choose our Action, which in this case is to turn on a fan. So we will find and select the fan we want to turn on, and hit "Next", and then set it to turn On:
Step 8
Now, we don't want the fan to run forever once the automation is complete, so we have two choices: we can set a Turn Off timer, or we can create a second automation that turns off the same Fan when the temperature Drops Below 70ºF. For this, we're going to use a simple Turn Off time set to 30 minutes. To do this, tap on the "Turn Off" section, and choose "After 30 minutes":
To complete your automation, tap "Done" and you'll see your completed automation.
In the Home app your automation will display in the list of automations:
In the Shortcuts app you may need to scroll down to "My Home" (or whatever you have named your Home in the Home app):
