Tip: Moving House... and the implications, work arounds, etc

Well, I'm moving house. Not surprisingly, as I live in Silicon Valley, I have sold my house to another techie and they were thrilled that it is HomeKit.

In California, you have to sell the house with anything that is actually part of the house. e.g. Light Switches, Wall Outlets, Ceiling Fans, etc.

Now, here's a problem..... what to do about the home? It's registered under my Apple ID. 

Initially I thought about just adding them as an invited user and making them an admin and removing myself when we actually hand the house over.... but there in lies the rub. You can grant someone the right to Add and Edit, but not full ownership of the Home. There are some workarounds to make it less onerous, but it still requires deleting the accessories and them to your new home. You can then use something like Controller to do all your setup again b using their backup/restore capability.... but I have over 90 physical accessories!

Also, part of the problem is that not all companies enable you to add HomeKit without actually using their App. Really damn annoying especially when you split up some things. e.g., I have Netatmo outdoor and indoor cameras. The Indoor cameras are coming with me. The outdoor ones are staying!

Essentially, I had to start again from scratch. All 272 physical and virtual accessories and over 80 rules!

So, here's a tip:

When setting up an Apple Home, do it under a generic Apple ID and register all your devices using the same email address.

Now, there are some implications of this that I'm still working through.

First of all, this Apple ID is now the owner of the house. If you don't want to keep logging in and out of devices, which is a major PITA, then you have to have a device that is dedicated to that Apple ID. Fortunately, I had an iPad mini that I had been using as a controller in my Living Room, so I used that.

I invited myself and partner to the house, and this means the HomePods were easily sorted. I added them under the new house AppleID, but made myself the default user. I've also added the house to my Family Sharing.

Adding the house to Family Sharing means that I can still have HomeKit Secure Video working, and it also gives access to my Music account.

This means that when you leave you can just deregister any devices you are taking, and then you just have to hand over passwords and remove the house from your Family sharing.

<update> 10th Feb 2021

I was struggling with my tv, but it seems the way to do it was to :

• have it logged in and set up as me. 
• Delete it from the previous home. 
• Add the new home Apple ID into my family sharing
• delete me as the default user on the tv
• Add the home Apple ID as the default user

It now appears inside the home, but I still have access to all my old content because of family sharing.

<Update> 12th Feb 2021

I have now managed to add my Denon amp to the home. I had to do it from the device logged in as the Apple ID that is the owner of the home, even though my Apple ID has Add and Edit privileges for the home and I could add other devices.