Moving from Skylight Calendar to Equal House, step by step

Moving from Skylight is different from moving between two phone apps, because Skylight is a screen on the kitchen wall. You don’t have to take it down. Plenty of families keep the screen for the calendar everyone glances at, and use Equal House on their phones for sharing out the work. This guide covers both: moving across completely, or running the two side by side.

Families moving from another family app can have a month of Equal House Pro on us with code SWITCH, which unlocks the calendar link in step 2. It is 31 days of Pro for the whole household, with no card and nothing to cancel, and it never turns into a subscription. It works once per household, once per person and once per email address, is limited to the first 10,000 households, and closes at 23:59 UK time on 31 March 2027. Every condition is on the switch page.

1. Set up your household

Install the Equal House app, sign in and give your household a name. Bric can ask a few quick questions and set it up with you, or you can do it yourself: see set up your household.

If you are claiming the free month, leave your email on the claim page first and sign in to the app with the same address. The month starts when you sign in.

2. Bring your calendar across, through Google or iCloud

Skylight doesn’t give its own calendar a link that other apps can read, and its help describes no export. What it does do is sync with your personal calendars. Its help says it syncs both ways with Google Calendar and iCloud Calendar: events added on the Skylight screen are written back to that Google or iCloud calendar too. Outlook, Yahoo and Cozi sync one way only, into Skylight.

So the calendar to link is the one behind Skylight:

1. Check which calendars Skylight syncs, in the Skylight app’s calendar settings. If one is Google or iCloud, syncing both ways, everything on the screen is already in it.
2. Find that calendar’s iCal link. Our guide Link your Google, Outlook or Apple calendar shows where Google, Outlook and Apple keep it.
3. In Equal House, More → Calendar Sync, paste the link, give it a name, and choose whose events these are.

What to expect:

• It is read-only and one-way. You change those events in Google, iCloud or on the Skylight screen, and nothing Equal House does is written back.
• It refreshes through the day, not instantly, so something added on the screen can take a few hours to appear on your phones.

Events that only exist on Skylight, because they were added there before Skylight was syncing both ways with Google or iCloud, need bringing across another way: photograph the screen, or screenshot the Skylight app, and use Bric → Bric can read… → A screenshot. Magic Add suggests the events it finds and adds nothing until you confirm. The repeating ones (the weekly club, bin day, birthdays) are quicker added once as repeating events.

3. Chores, lists and meals

We could not find an export for Skylight’s chore chart, lists or meal plans in its help, so copy them across by hand:

• chores become tasks, and the ones that come round again become repeating tasks. Unlike a chore chart, Equal House weights each job by effort and shares the grown-ups’ jobs out fairly; ready-made tasks cover most household chores in a couple of taps;
• the children’s chores and rewards go on their own board in Kid Zone, where a chore can pay stars and pocket money once a grown-up has checked it is done;
• shopping goes on the shared shopping list, sorted into UK supermarket aisle order;
• meals: the meal planner picks from the 6,031 recipes on equal.house/recipes, fills the shopping list and shares the cooking out. On the free plan a meal plan covers three days; a full week needs Pro. See plan a week of meals.

4. Invite the family

• Grown-ups get an invite: More → Your Account → Add a family member, then share the invite however you usually talk to them. See invite another adult.
• Children need no email address or password. Add them as children, and they sign in with the family’s six-picture code and an optional PIN, on a device a grown-up has approved. See add a child and how children sign in.

5. Keeping something on the wall

If you are keeping the Skylight, nothing more to do: it carries on showing the Google or iCloud calendar, and Equal House shows the same calendar on everyone’s phone.

If you are retiring it, a spare tablet can take its place. Equal House’s Family Wall is a full-screen view of today, large enough to read from across the kitchen. It is not dedicated hardware and has no wall mount, but it is on every plan. See put Equal House on a kitchen screen.

6. Give it a week

Tick things off as you do them for a week, then open the Fairness Score on the Tasks tab. It shows how the grown-ups are sharing the household work, by effort rather than by count, and Auto-Balance can move jobs to whoever has room. See what the Fairness Score means.

What doesn’t come across

• Skylight’s calendar comes across only through the Google or iCloud calendar it syncs with, read-only; anything only on the screen goes through Magic Add or by hand.
• Chores, lists and meal plans don’t move automatically.
• A dedicated, always-on wall screen isn’t something Equal House makes. The Family Wall runs on a screen you already have: see turn a spare screen into a family wall.

If you paid for Skylight Plus and are retiring the screen, cancel it where you bought it once you have finished moving. For the honest comparison of the two, see Skylight Calendar vs Equal House.