At some point in the past I connected my Sonos system to HomeKit. I have no recollection of doing this, but obviously I did it because my Sonos speakers show up in my iOS Home app.
I have a range of Sonos equipment – some of it dating back to 2012. I started with a few Play:3s and a Play:5. Today I have Era 100s, Roams, a Beam, a couple of Amps, Play:3s, Play:1s, and Ones.
At the risk of jinxing myself, the system has been quite stable for the last year or so. I moved most of my older hardware to my place in Vermont, where there’s less wifi interference from neighbors, leaving most of my newer equipment in Massachussetts. Maybe the newer stuff handles wifi interference better? Not sure, but in the past, I regularly had to move the channels that my Sonos was on, and had frequent drops and other issues with AirPlay.
However, one issue had persisted. My Bedroom Era 100 would frequently fail to let me AirPlay to it. I would have to try again after a looooong pause where whatever I was trying to play from my iPhone would continue on in the background, silently, then it would fail. I would have to stop the podcast or music, rewind it, try again to AirPlay to the Era 100, possibly fail again, and then finally it would work. Alternately, I could just reboot the Era 100 and it would start to work immediately.
I opened a support ticket with Sonos on this. They directed me to move the unit and suggested it was wifi interference. I swapped the Bedroom Era 100 with the Bathroom 1 One. Remarkably everything worked fine. So if it was wifi interference, it would seem the older One was more tolerant of it, and the newer Era 100 was happier in the Bathroom. I swapped the room names in Sonos. Life was good.
For a day.
Then I told my phone to AirPlay to the Bathroom 1 speaker. I heard nothing. Then I listened closely and heard music… from upstairs… in the Bedroom. Hmm. I looked in my Sonos settings and, sure enough, the Era 100 thought it was in the Bathroom 1, and the One thought itself in the Bedroom. “Huh. I was sure I fixed that. Oh well.” I swapped the room names again.
And a day later, they had swapped back.
Because I can be stubborn, this pattern persisted for weeks. I would change the speaker room names, and they would change back. Finally, I logged a ticket with Sonos. The agent in chat helpfully suggested that my integrations (Alexa or HomeKit) could be to blame.
I went into my HomeKit settings and – sure enough, they had the wrong names. By this point – for some reason – only the Bedroom (Era 100) was an issue. As a result, I had two Bathroom 1 speakers (which is GREAT when you’re trying to rename or move things… “Wait… WHICH Bathroom 1 is this again?”
After much struggling – and failing – to rename the Bathroom 1 speaker, I ended up just deleting my Bathroom 1 room speaker altogether. Problem solved. Now when I tell my iPhone to AirPlay to Bathroom 1 or the Bedroom, I am (reasonably) confident that it will go to the right place. Phew. I have no speaker showing up in Bathroom 1 anymore, or the Bedroom, for that matter. And I don’t really care since I’ve never really used HomeKit to control my speakers.
This raises the question “if I DID want to use HomeKit to control my Sonos speakers (which I removed from HomeKit), how would I add them back?”
No idea. That’s a topic for another blog post.