This is actually very hard. Originally, when Apple had a five-camera limit on HomeKit Secure Video recording, we had two accounts both with Apple One on them. One had two houses in the family with three cameras. And the other five cameras. We also had Meross smart switches, Philips Hue lights, and HomePods which were distributed across these two accounts.
But with the launch of Monterey, they removed this limit, so it should be easy to just migrate three Eufy cameras, the HomePods and the Philips Hue bridges and bulbs from one account to another. But actually, you can’t do this. Instead, you actually have to reset all these devices when you do the move.
Also, the way that permissions and user accounts are handled has to be completely rebuilt. Sigh. So, if you get stuck in this situation or perhaps you want to take an existing camera and give it to someone in your family, here is what you have to do:
Removing the old Home
- Create a new Home with the new account. There is no way to “transfer” devices from even one home let alone even one account to another. So go to your old Home and remove each accessories from it. This is easy for the HomePod as it is just clicking on the Gears icon and then scrolling to the bottom and then choosing Remove.
- Removing all the items from the old Home. If you have put all the HomeKit devices on the favorites page, the click on each and for the HomePods scroll down to the gears icon and click, then scroll all the way down and choose Remove.
- For Hue, this is much harder because, the Hue bridge does not appear in the list to remove it and you can’t remove individual items there. So you need to start the Hue application (there is no MacOS version of that) on your iPhone or iPad and go to correct Hue Bridge and then in the lower left choose the Settings icon and then confusing to Voice Assistants, you will firn Siri & HomeKit and then there will be a settings button at the bottom and you can choose reset.
- Removing the old Home from the old account. One note is that the Monterey MacOS and the iOS 15 have unified the Home application so at least they work more like each other. The hardest thing is figuring out how to get the preference pane for a home. The trick on iOS is to click on the Home icon at the upper left and scroll all the way down to Edit Home. This has changed from iOS 14 where you actually had to go to a home and then the BACK button BACK button didn’t take you back but actually to the preference sheet for the home.
- Note that every user that you had is also going to have to do the same as removing the home here does not remove it for all the users. Confusing isn’t it. So you have going to have to go to each user phone and remove the Home setting
Creating a new Home, reset devices and add them
Now you have to more laboriously:
- Now you go a Phone that is logged into the new iCloud account. Note that switching iCloud logins on the same phone is a really long process because you are logging out of all the iCloud services. So it is more handy just to have a spare phone with the old login rather than logging out of your main phone.
- So on the new Phone, on iOS you will see a plus sign on the top and you can choose New Home and this will give you the new Home dialog and create an empty home. On MacOS, this plus sign is actually at the upper right, but it doesn’t have add Home, so I’m not quite sure how to do this.
- Now for the HomePods, removing them from the old home actually causes a factory reset. If that didn’t work, you have to power off the HomePod by unplugging it and then hold down the top button until then wait for the bing and then wait for the top to go red and then it should say I’m about to reset. Then you reconfigure this as you normally would and it should end up in the correct home.
- With Philips, it looks like the only way to do this is to first login to https://account.meethue.com and then since you need a dedicated account per bridge (which is really too bad), you click remove from the old account if it was for someone else. Then you have to factory reset the Philips Hue bridge by powering it on and putting a pin into the factory reset button behind it. Then with the Hue application on you will create a new Hue. Then you go to Search and rediscover all the devices in the home. And you have to put them all into the proper rooms. Then go to the Settings/Siri & Homekit and add it to the new home. Whew!\
- For the Eufy Cameras, you factory reset them by pressing the little lever in the back for several seconds until the front light blinks blue. Then start the Eufy application and add them
- Finally, you have to recreate all the automations that you had to make this work.
