Smart homes can be complex animals, an amalgam of many different brands of accessories, and sometimes more platforms. That beast can get out of hand, even with the Apple HomeKit. Here's how to reset your HomeKit and why you might want to consider doing so.

Read more: The best HomeKit accessories for your smart home

Normally, there is no real "reset" button for HomeKit. But Apple organizes platform data into "houses" and it's relatively easy to delete it from the Home app for iPhone or iPad, especially since most people only have one place to live at a time.

Follow these steps to delete a HomeKit:

• Open the Home app and tap the house icon in the upper left corner of the screen.
• Make sure your home name is selected in the drop-down menu. It will probably be preselected unless you have intentionally added a second location.
• In the same drop-down menu, tap Home settings.
• Scroll down and choose Remove Home.
• Follow the instructions.

Please note that if you do this, you will lose all information associated with a home, including accessory pairs. You'll need to re-pair everything if you want to start over, which can be time consuming even if you've saved your HomeKit codes for scanning. It's a good idea to gather those codes in one place for future reference.

You'll see a reset button if the Home app crashes at a Upload props and scenes screen. If this happens, tap Reset your home configuration, and once confirmed, your data will be scraped as if you had followed the steps above.

Why reset Apple HomeKit?

There are several reasons. The first, as I mentioned, is if the Home app crashes Upload props and scenes. This is an unlikely issue, and there are other steps you can take before resetting your HomeKit. These include restarting any Home hubs (Apple TVs, HomePods, iPads) or disconnecting from iCloud and then reconnecting. You can even try to reset an affected iPhone or iPad and restore a backup before things go awry, but this takes a long time. in itself, without a guarantee of success. You may also lose saved data after backup.

The other reason is that your HomeKit setup has become cumbersome. Over time, it is quite possible to accumulate a collection of unused accessories, scenes, and automation, in which case a reset can be a shortcut to a more elegant configuration, as long as you have all the codes gathered to pair the accessories. In fact, we recommend that you remove unused accessories from your HomeKit at regular intervals, as Wi-Fi routers may start to interrupt device connections if they become oversaturated.

Read more: The best smart home devices you can buy