Wendell over at Level1Techs had a brief aside in one of his Level1Linux weekly videos about IKEA’s smart home devices, including a temperature and air quality sensor that is fairly decent available for cheap. On a lark, I decided to grab a collection of devices and try them out, and I’ve been very happy with the experience so far. I’ll talk about what devices I tried out and my experience with them first, and then I’ll talk a little bit about how I have adopted smart home devices, and why I’m a fan of the tech being used with these IKEA devices.
Adopting all of these devices was incredibly straight-forward. I use Home Assistant as my smart home hub. Since the devices I grabbed are Matter over Thread devices (more details below), the first thing I needed was a Thread radio for Home Assistant. Home Assistant’s own ZBT-2 radio has first class support on the platform, and a real nice antenna which should make covering my modest sized house easy. Getting it set up was a breeze. My Home Assistant system is a HAOS VM running atop Proxmox. In order for Home Assistant to see the radio, I had to connect it to my Proxmox host where HAOS lives and pass through the USB device to the VM. Once done, HA saw the radio as a new device to pair, and was ready to flash the firmware for Thread operation. With the radio set up, the pairing instructions for my Matter devices was pretty easy. I was instructed to use the Home Assistant Connect app on my phone to snap a picture of the QR code on the device, and after a few moments, the device was paired and ready to use.
The ZBT-2 has firmware to support connecting either to Zigbee or Thread devices, but can only talk to one of them at a time. According to the FAQ, they tested multiprotocol support with both the ZBT-2 and its predecessor, but found it was not stable, and lead to an unsupportable operation environment. Their suggestion - If you want both Zigbee and Thread, run 2 radios. I don’t have any Zigbee devices, so the choice was pretty straightforward.
First is the IKEA ALPSTUGA air quality sensor. I’ve been wanting to measure air quality indoors for a while now. I’ve been concerned about reasons that I might be feeling brain fog and fatigue, and whether it might be related to high CO2 concentrations. While I would have loved to have gotten a more accurate monitor, the hope is that this gives me enough data to work off of for now. The additional temperature and PM2.5 sensors are also neat, especially since I’ve been wanting to use temperature data as a gate to automate transcoding of my media library to AV1 so long as it doesn’t heat up my office too much. Powered by USB-C, and with a soft white diffused LED display that is visible but not obtrusive at night, I’m pretty happy with the devices. I grabbed two of them, one for my wife’s and my offices, and I may get more for other rooms as well to get more coverage throughout the home. For the in-HA experience, I’m pairing this with a slick air quality card by Kaden Thompson that includes healthy thresholds. I had it set up without them, but I like the whole graph experience there.
Next is the IKEA BILRESA series of smart home buttons. These are pretty slick! A sure fire way to help your smart home endeavors gain “spouse approval”, and start to transition a self-hosted smart home system from a geeky toy into a usable system away from all your tech. The out-of-the-box experience with HA was a little less intuitive to work with than the Alpstuga, but with a blueprint from HA forums user censay, the configuration experience becomes quite easy. Gotta love the community. My wife has been using this remote to control the lights in her office to great effect.
Lastly, I picked up an IKEA GRILLPLATS smart outlet. I don’t really have a use case for this one yet, but given it supports up to 15A @ 1800W, I’ve been thinking I’d try it out as a remote restart option for devices that need power cycling. Mostly it was an excuse to play with it while also getting a second Bilresa remote I can use for my lights in my office. That’s the slick part! I bought the Grillplats kit with a remote, but the remote is not paired with the outlet - it’s simply another Matter device I can assign to whatever role I want it to have in Home Assistant.
Anywho, I know this isn’t an exhaustive review of these devices, but they’re working great in my setup, and I’m pretty pleased. If you’re interested in why I chose this direction instead of some other smart home options, you can continue reading below.
I’ve been a slow, but always interested adopter of smart home devices. Mostly smart bulbs, but that has slowly grown to include more devices to collect more data about what’s going on in my home, and how I can make changes to improve things in the place I spend the vast majority of my time. I’ve also been reticent in allowing cloud-connected smart home tech to live in my home. There is nothing about how my home operates that I want anyone from outside my home to access, and in the incredibly rare instance where I might want that to happen, I will happily connect to my home network to access it. These requirements have made finding smart home tech options that meet my requirements a challenge to find, which is why I was stoked when IKEA’s smart home devices came across my radar.
IKEA has sold smart home tech for a while, but they have been replatforming their ecosystem onto Matter over Thread. Matter is an open protocol for smart home device communication, and Thread is a wireless mesh networking protocol over which many Matter devices communicate. Devices that implement the Matter protocol, whether connecting over Thread or WiFi, are essentially usable with any hub, assuming said hub has support for the class of device you’re pairing with it. This means that, rather than using IKEA or another vendor’s cloud dependent hub, I can use the venerable Home Assistant, which seems to be compatible with everything I’ve thrown at it and then some.
Being able to add some real nice smart devices to my home without sending that data out to someone’s SaaS for harvesting and cataloging rocks. I’m definitely looking forward to discovering more Matter devices that make sense for my home.