This works be obvious but amazingly I’ve not found it noted on the internet. But one issue is that if you move Apple home devices from one home to another some truly bizarre things happen.
I moved three HomePods, an Aqara hub and a safe alert fire alarm. The confusing thing is that even though they were in a different house they still reported that they were in the old house. Since music played and all worked o don’t worry about it.
When I think about it, of course the software is confused. All the homes I manage use the same Ip network and WiFi for convenience but this also means it’s impossible for the devices to know if they are still in the old house and all the other devices have just disappeared
Then a power failures
By luck the three HomePods I moved were not the main home controller. Apple home uses a distributed system that elects a controller and everyone else is on Standby. it’s kind of amazing that there must be some iCloud coordination function so it melded the HomePods on the old and new home into one virtual home. You can are where this is going.
But we had a power failure, so the three HomePods dutifully noticed and elected one of them as the new Controller. And that controller is in the wrong house!
But most stuff just still works
It turns out that even this catastrophe is not fatal. The Apple Home Controller is only used for some management functions. As an example this still worked despite the fact that we had a split network. (Which is why it took me three days to figure this out):
1. Turning in and off the Hue lights just worked. Apparently the controller-less HomePods had enough cached to reach the Hue controller
2. The temperature and humidity for each room worked so this must also be peer to peer.
3. Adding a new device worked?! It layers some sense, adding a new device happens on your phone. And apparently it gets added in iCloud. You can’t access it though.
4. The list of devices available is pretty large, so availability must be distributed.
What hub’s are active
How do you figure this out. Well buried deep in Home Settings > Home Hub and Bridges is a list and I saw all these HomePods I knew were running listed as “Not Responding”. The only HomePods visible were the ones in the new house. Aha!
The fix unplug the HomePods
So the fix is to find and unplug the HomePods in the new house. It takes a few minutes but eventually Apple Home> your home > Home settings > Home Hub and bridges notice and you get a controller again.
You are warned. Next time i remove apple home devices from our house, I’ll factory reset them first and remove them the Apple Home app too
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