Why you need a GUEST MODE for your smart home!

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smart home automations are great I love them and it's a big part of what we do here on this channel but let's face it sometimes you might just not want these automations to run for example you know I probably don't want my nightly automation that turns off all the lights and locks the door if maybe I have guests over so today I want to show you an easy way that you can handle this sort of thing we're going to create a guest mode that when enabled will force your automations to not run it'll basically skip the automation that way you never have to worry about leaving your guest in the dark let's go foreign what's up guys my name is Shane if this is your first time here and this channel is all about building an easy smart home using Apple's home kit with new videos published every Sunday and live streams every Wednesday today's video is sponsored by econet they make a product called the Bulldog valve robot and I have it set up in possibly one of my most important automations here in my smart home if any of my water sensors around my entire house detects a leak the Bulldog robot will automatically shut off the water to my entire house without me even having to be there or do anything else it's a retrofit option so you don't need to cut any pipes or hire a plumber the build quality is fantastic on this thing and they have really good customer service as well they have a Z-Wave version and a Wi-Fi version now they don't support home kit natively but both of these do work in home kit through home Bridge which is what I'm doing works great they also support smart things Google Alexa and IFTTT shutting the water off immediately can potentially save you a ton of money and damages in the event of a water related emergency and I just love the peace of mind that I get having this thing set up and automated in my smart home check out the link below in the description for more information on the Bulldog valve robot and big thanks to econet for sponsoring today's video the other night I was hanging out at a friend's house drinking beer watching some football and then all of a sudden at 10 pm a lot of his lights in the living room just kind of turned off he whipped out his phone real quick and started kind of turning lights back on one by one so what exactly happened here this was his nightly automation that he has set to run every night at 10 pm and wind trigger turns off the lights although this is normally perfect for his schedule I assume he'd rather not have this happen while you know hanging out with guests on the weekend and then there was a similar comment over in my member Discord server if you're a channel member you can get access to that Discord community and some other cool perks just click the join button down below next to the Subscribe button if you're interested but one of our members Tom posted over there he said I had some guests over last night I needed to leave my apartment to run a few forgotten errands at the local night shop after leaving of course my home went into away mode and all the lights music and screens shut down with all my guests there is there any way to avoid such an embarrassment so this is another great example of when you'd want an automation not to run Tom is using a location-based automation that runs when he leaves his home so all these situations can be fixed with the simple guest mode and you can do the same thing for something like a vacation mode or any other modes that you might want to set up stick around I'll have a couple more ideas towards the end of this video so let's set up a guest mode you know specifically for this kind of scenario this guest mode will essentially just be a simple toggle switch and we'll use that switch as a condition for our automation so let me explain I'll break it down really just into two separate parts to get this all set up first we need our guest mode switch there are two good ways to do this if you are using something like home Bridge or Hooves you can use the dummy switches plug-in which is great and just create a virtual switch call it guest mode and you're good to go that's all you need to do you now have a guest mode switch if you don't have home Ridge or Hooves or anything like that don't worry you can still do the same thing with just a cheap smart plug any smart plug will work as long as it supports home kit we won't actually plug anything into this plug so you might want to just put it you know somewhere out of sight out of mind we'll just need access to this smart plug in the home app call it guest mode and you're all good to go first part is complete now that we have our guest mode switch in the home app we'll need to add this as a condition to our automations basically we want our automation to say yes run every night or when I leave the house however you want it unless guest mode is turned on so that guest mode switch will be our condition and there's really two ways to set this up you can either do it all in the home app using convert to shortcut or you can use a third-party home kit app either one of these methods is fine I'll actually go ahead and show you both methods real quick today just so you get an idea pick whichever one suits you okay so if we open up the home app and let's go over to create a new automation you can you know time of day when you leave the house or whatever let's go with people leave and we'll do just like Tom scenario if I leave the house so I'm going to tap just me here choose next and instead of choosing our accessories you would want to come on or off like normal or probably off if you're leaving the house I'm gonna go all the way down tap convert to shortcut and here you can choose your accessories I'm just going to delete that to keep it simple I'm going to tap add action and we're going to go look for an if action okay we're gonna again want to say if that guest mode is off basically so let's go to select accessory now we're going to look for that guest mode accessory there we go guest mode so if guest mode is off now we're going to control the accessories in our home so just control Watley home right here and you can choose if you have a scene set if you have certain lights you can do however you want maybe you have a leaving scene you can just tap that let's just create a couple lights here just to kind of give you an example and I want to make sure all these are off tap done and it's really that easy we can put a nothing action here at the end if you want or you can just delete otherwise but this is going to say when I leave the house if guest mode is off it's going to turn off my accessories right here now if guest mode is not off meaning if guest mode is on it's going to do nothing so it's going to skip this and it's not going to run that automation if if guest mode is off so tap next and you're done when I leave the home you can name this if you want that's all you have to do for this method now real quick I do want to show you if you want to add this to an existing automation maybe you already have an automation set for when you leave the house you can do that without having to recreate everything let me show you that real quick so here's a good one let's uh let's do this right here so when the last person leaves home I have these couple of scenes so I don't really want to recreate this if you just go in here and tap select scenes and accessories you can see my stuff is already selected so this could be an existing automation maybe you want to add this to go all the way down tap convert to shortcut here and you can see it's going to automatically put those scenes and those lights and everything that you already had configured in here so you don't have to kind of reselect those now you just look for that but if action select accessory same thing we just did guest mode is off put this in there boom there you go that's all you really need to do to update your existing automation so now the other way to do this is using a third-party home kit app so something like the controller for a home kit app the home plus app the eve app is a free one so the EVAP is free any of these apps these are third-party home kit apps they allow you to add conditions to your automations really easily something you really can't do on the home app unless you do that whole convert to shortcut and use scripting stuff so maybe you want to go this route I'll open up the home plus app again you can use any of these home kit apps I'll put links to all of them down below but if I go over to automations let's just create a new Automation and I'll name it you know nightly this would be my not nightly Automation and the event let's do a time of day so let's say the tank time changes to let's go 10 p.m so let's do one like my buddy had that went off the other night so 10 p.m um you can choose under the conditions so this will happen on all day so you can change this to certain days if you want all days is good I'm gonna go in accessory state so these are your conditions so this must also be true so I'm gonna look for that guest mode switch here it is right here power state so if the studio guest mode power state is equal to off uh so that's what we want we want it to only run if it's off so every night at 10 if guest mode is off and also it's during this is any day of the week now I'm going to add accessory and you can choose which lights you want to control or you can add a scene so I can just you know say all lights out boom that's really all you have to do so now every night 10 pm use that guest mode as your condition right here turn out all my lights that's all you have to do now that our automations are all set up all you need to do is just turn on that guest mode anytime you don't want those automations to run you can take this concept you know into other directions too like maybe a vacation mode I mentioned earlier I was thinking even setting up a neighborhood walk switch something like that so I had this automation set for a while that would basically open my garage door every time I arrived home it worked great but every time I go on a walk around the neighborhood my garage door would open when I was like walking down certain streets you know like behind my house or whatever so now I can just create like uh you know going on a walk switch or whatever you want to call it and use that in my automation so that it won't run if I'm going on a walk just turn on that switch when I go on a walk so those are just some more ideas for you we want these automations to work for us obviously but the last thing we want is to get frustrated or embarrassed when they you know run at times when we don't want them to like I don't know when you have a house full of guests or something like that you can check out my automations and playlists right here for some more videos you know to help you get the most out of your smart home automations thanks again to econet for sponsoring today's video check out that link below for more details on the Bulldog valve robot that I'm using be sure to subscribe and turn on notifications if you haven't already for new videos and live streams every week thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video

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