Add a Smart Plug to Apple Home

Hi, it’s Jacob here, and in this short QuickTip video I’m going to show you how we can connect a smart plug to the Apple Home app on your iPhone. Which means that you can control electrical appliances around your house, such as Christmas lights or desk fans – anything that’s not a smart appliance – using your voice through Siri, or by using the Home app on your iPhone.

So, I’ve got a set of smart plugs here that I bought from Amazon. I’ll put a link in the description. They were quite cheap and they seem to work pretty well.

If I then press the plus button at the very top of the Home app, I can select Add Accessory. Now, as long as your accessory has a little badge on the box that says it works with Apple Home, there’s going to be a QR code on it. You can simply point the camera of your iPhone at the QR code, and just like this, it will register it and start connecting wirelessly to that device.

Once it’s been found, I can tap Add to Home, and then after a couple of moments it will be available to use on the phone.

At this point, we need to set up a couple of different things. First of all, which room the plug is going to be in – this one’s in my lounge. We’re also going to give it a name. You can call it whatever you like, but I’d advise naming it after what’s plugged into the outlet. So I’m going to label it Christmas Tree.

Then finally, we have the option of how you want this to be displayed in the Home app. Because an outlet can control different things, you could choose it to be a plug, a fan, or a lighting fixture. The only real difference here is the icon it gives you in the Home app. You can still only turn it on or off – you can’t dim lights using a smart plug, for example.

I’ll keep it as a power outlet and press Continue.

Finally, Home gives us some options for automations to automatically turn this socket on or off. I’m going to leave this for now, because we’ll cover that in the next video where we look at automating our Christmas lights. So I’ll tap View in Home, and it’s going to open up that new accessory in the Home app.

And just like this, you can see it’s turned on already. I can simply tap on it to turn it off – and just like that, the Christmas tree is off again. We’ll put it back on. As easy as that.

It’s taken about a minute to connect this device to the Home app, and now it works brilliantly. But we can also customise how it looks and works in the Home app if we want to.

Back on my main Home screen, I’ll go down to the lounge and long press on that new outlet. From here, I’ll press Accessory Settings. The first thing I can do is change the icon. Right now, that’s not a UK adapter, and I’d like it to look a bit more like a UK plug. So I can tap on the icon and choose the adapter style I want.

This is also another chance to change it from being a power socket to a fan or a light. If I change it to a light, for example, and then tap on the icon, you’ll see I can choose what sort of light icon I want. There’s no Christmas tree icon, so I’ll go back to the power outlet and keep the one I had before.

On this screen, we can also show or hide it from our Home view and add it to our favourites if we want to.

And just like that, I’ve now got my Christmas tree connected to the Home app. I can tap the button on screen here, or I can simply use my voice and say, “Hey Siri, turn on the Christmas tree.” I won’t do that now – your phone will go wild!

So the next thing to do is to create some automations so our lights come on automatically. Check out my next video and I’ll show you exactly how to do that. That’s it for this one. I’ll see you next time.