Homekit hubs appear in multiple homes - with separate networks, making devices not reachable. (homepod minis)

Hello SMTKSMTK,

Thanks for reaching out to Apple Support Communities. It sounds like you're having an issue with HomeKit hubs. We're happy to provide some information to get you in the right direction to assist.

The article here: Set up your HomePod, HomePod mini, Apple TV, or iPad as a home hub does mention "Check that the device that you set up as a home hub is in your home, connected to your home Wi-Fi network, and powered on."

"If your home hub isn't working as expected

• Check that your HomePod, HomePod mini, Apple TV 4K or Apple TV HD, or iPad is up to date. 
• Make sure that the user signed in to iCloud is the primary Home app user, and not an invited user. 
• Turn on iCloud Keychain and two-factor authentication for your Apple ID.
• Check that the device that you set up as a home hub is in your home, connected to your home Wi-Fi network, and powered on."

We'd also recommend checking and customizing the security based on which home you're in: Use routers secured with HomeKit

There's also some helpful third-party information for using HomeKit with multiple homes here: How to Add a Second Home to Apple HomeKit

If you continue to have an issue, hopefully others can post their personal experience. If not, reach out to Apple Support directly to further assist.

Contact Apple Support

Best.

In the Apple TV setting under "AirPlay and HomeKit" scroll down to the end where there is a menu:

"HUB FOR THE HOME"

In my case,

• Home 1 connected
• Home 2 connected

I click to change to "disconnect it for home 1."

When I go into the Home App for home 1 now, I can still see the hub form home 2, but the status is "disable". 😃

I never seen this menu before, and searching for it on Apple support, does not mention the option.

So now I just have to wait to see if this is the solution.

Ole 🇩🇰

If your problem is this:

• HomePod Mini in home “A” gets connected to home “B”
• This causes home “B” to loose contact from home “A”

I have a work-around that has worked for me for several weeks:

• Remove the HomePod Mini from any HomeKit homes you have set up
• Remove the HomePod Mini from your AppleID
• Do a factory reset of the HomePod Mini
• Create an additional AppleID that will be used for nothing else
• Log into the new AppleID
• Ensure you are connected to your normal WiFi network
• Set up the HomePod Mini as you normally would.  Note that it will want to connect to a HomeKit home.  Since you are on a new AppleID, it will create a new HomeKit home for you with nothing else in it but the HomePod Mini.
• Log out of the new AppleID and back into your main AppleID.

Your HomePod Mini will no longer show up as Apple devices under your AppleID.  It will not show up as a hub in any of your HomeKit homes.  This is the downside. The HomePod Mini will no longer be able to be used as a hub and will not serve as a fallback hub for HomeKit.

Your HomePod Mini will show up on your network as an AirPlay device that you can use to stream music.

Your HomePod Mini will also work as a Siri device

Here are 2 temporary workarounds. Method 1 is the best solution but more time consuming.

1. Using a separate account to create secondary home

This method is painful because you have to start over on your second home but it will separate the hubs according to the home.

a) create another apple ID. login to this new appleid on your phone or ipad.

b) Create a home with the new apple ID

c) add your primary appleID (the one you regularly uses) to the home as an admin

d) login back to your primary ID on your phone. You can still manage/add devices/people using your primary apple id.

2. Restart your router daily.

This method is easy as long as you can schedule your router to reboot daily. Every time it reboot/disconnects from the internet for a short amount of time, it'll disconnect from remote home hubs and switch back to the local hub. Downside is this won't fix the problem when it switches hubs in the middle of the day.

a)schedule a reboot daily at night, at a time you won't be using the homekit network.

Until apple fixes this, we are stuck with these options for now. Method 1 works very well.

I was able to fix this issue. I'm not sure if my situation is applicable to everyone here, so your mileage may vary.

In my case, home B was set up after home A (in fact - it was created while I was physically at home A - not sure if that matters).

Over time I added home hubs (Apple TVs and HomePods) to Home B. I noticed that Home A only had hubs from Home A. But Home B had all its own hubs, AND every hub from Home A.

The fix was simple - I just re-setup all the hubs in Home A:

• For Apple TVs, I removed them from Home (Settings -> AirPlay and HomeKit -> Room -> Remove From Home). It's worth noting that before doing this, the 'Home Hub' section of the 'AirPlay and HomeKit' menu showed both homes! I also logged out of iCloud (Users and Accounts -> Default User -> Remove User from Apple TV). Then I just re-added my iCloud user as the default user, and used my iPhone to set it up.
• For HomePods, I just removed them from the Home app and set them up again.

In both situations, during setup it would ask me which home and room to associate the device with.

Since doing this, Home B only has the hubs for Home B, and same for Home A.

So again - I'm not sure why the hubs from home A were associated with home B when that home was set up. But setting them up again seems to have fixed it.

I posted sometime ago that I installed the latest iOS on all devices and that it was fixed… Yeah, for 2 weeks. The issue is back.

I am away for 4 days and the Camera at home is not working because Homepod from Garage, that is on completely different separate network, became a hub for my Home… This Homekit

system is not reliable. Considering switching to your usual monitoring system. What a disaster.

As an update since this post:

I should note that (until today) I had the routers at two of my physical homes configured with the same SSID. At the office the SSID is different. The office is also the only location which didn’t suffer the home hub mixup issue.

I called support this morning from home 2 to see if they had any suggestions. The call was escalated to a “Senior Advisor”, or something along those lines. While they could not provide a solution, they did take extensive notes. At the end of the call we decided that I would ensure the firmware on my router was updated, delete home 2 from the home app, change the SSID on that router so that home 1 and 2 would no longer have the same SSID, recreate home 2, and re-add the accessories. Obviously changing the SSID also meant having to reconnect every wireless device around the house but it was worth a shot. Before beginning any of this I also decided I would remove the two other “residents” from all of the homes.

After I recreated home 2 I reset my apple tv and minis. Added them to the recreated home 2. Once these were established, I began to re-add accessories. Eventually I stopped because I needed to travel to home 1. I drove there (30km ish), was there for 30 minutes or so, checked the home app while I was there - Home Hubs were still showing in their correct homes.

Drove back to home 2, added a few more accessories, then noticed that once again, my Home Hubs from home 2 are now showing in home 1’s hub list again. At the moment home 1 is still “connected” to a home 1 hub and home 2 is still “connected” to a home 2 hub; however, it is a matter of time before one of the homes goes offline.

I called support back just to update the case and spoke to another senior advisor who suggested that I should wait 24 hours between deleting the home from the home app and recreating it so as to allow any residual data to be completely deleted from the cloud from the previous setup.

i took two screenshots off my phone of my home and garage which are separate everything. Hubs and routers. On my home, I was able to disable the garage hub on my Apple TV in the living room which was always connecting to the garage somehow thus losing access to my house. I haven’t tried my bedroom Apple TV yet because it never has connected to that yet. When you look at my garage settings,(these screenshots are from the home app on garage and home then I click on home settings from each entity) you can see now that the living room Apple TV is disabled on the garage side so now it can’t connect. I believe it’ll also disable the bedroom tv as well if I went into Apple TV and disabled the garage on it. This has worked for me ever since for like a month and I’m all over the country. I haven’t checked the settings on the mini home which is in my garage to see if I can disable anything in my home, but if you have appletvs, this is how you do it and it should be the same across the board of every device. I say should, but I haven’t checked yet.

so all in all, this is the solution.

I have the same issue. I fixed it by resetting my HomePod. Say you have two homes set up with HomeKit: Home A and Home B. And you also have two HomePods: HomePod A and HomePod B. You set up HomePod A in Home A and HomePod B in Home B.

Now you add bulb A. And the Bulb A is in Home A and when you set up Bulb A, your iPhone is connected to Home A's Wi-Fi. But, when you add Bulb A, you accidentally selected Home B (!!!). That's when problems arise. Then, in Home B, you will be able to see HomePod A.

Before resetting your HomePod, please double-check there are no devices in the wrong home. To change the home of your device, you have to delete it and reset it. You might need to create a new Home or delete all related accessories to fix this problem.

Also please disable VPN when setup the accessories. And, make sure the Wi-Fi SSID is different for each home.

Same issue here. Simple setup, home and office. Periodically, my Home HomeKit hub appears as the hub at the office. I should be able to have two homes and not have the Hub get confused right? I remove the hub from my AppleID/iCloud account, and eventually the other location will fail back to an appropriate hub. But in the meantime - no - it's not staying that way. It'll pickup another device at my Home, and then all the Office devices will fall offline. Seems like a huge bug, and security risk.

Same issue. I can force my 1st home to stop using my 2nd home's homepod by taking the 2nd home's wifi offline for a few minutes which forced my 1st home to use the 1st home's homepod.... but now my 2nd home is using the 1st home's homepod too and all the accessories in the 2nd home are not working.

Come on Apple, it's not rocket science.

@OrigamiFan1, none of the links you provided address the question that was asked.

I have the same basic problem. Mine is a little different in that I don’t want the HomePod mini’s to take control of homekit.

Also, the HomePod mini in one location is being ‘Connected’ to control the OTHER location, making it unusable remotely.

The answer is that Apple needs to give the user a little control over which hubs can and cant connect to different homes.

i'm in my weekend home now. When I setup the homepod as home hub in the weekend homes wifi it appears in my (30miles away, different wifi, different ssid) home besides the currect apple tv home hub. AND apple tv is on standby / homepod is connected.

This just started today. before it worked (homepod as home hub for weekend home / apple tv as home hub for home home) for a long time....

It started over night when I was at home. Now being in the weekend home I reset the homepod several times but it always sets itself up as homehub for my home home again and again.

Any ideas anyone?

best nils