IKEA NZ Smart Home Products

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Master Geek
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#3500866 7-Jun-2026 08:30

I have Hue lights throughout the main house (with the exception of some IKEA bookcase lights which are adopted directly to Hue and work perfectly well). Recently renovated the sleepout and installed IKEA smart lights, switches, smart plugs and sensors there to keep the cost down - it worked out at less than 1/5th of the cost vs Hue. I was a little skeptical given the price point - especially when compared to Hue.

I'd agree with other reviewers that the colours perhaps aren't as sharp as Hue products, and the 'wheel' on the Bilresa switch is a bit fiddly - but honestly for the price I'm amazed. If I didn't already have Hue products in the house I'd seriously consider IKEA instead. I did invest in the Dirigera hub which is in the sleepout too. My daughter is home for a short time and using them daily - and says the user experience has been excellent, in terms of quality of the lights and control via the switches or the app. All super easy to set up and add to both Apple Home and Home Assistant for more integrated control. The range is currently a little limited, but hoping that will grow over time.

fearandloathing

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#3501081 7-Jun-2026 18:17

fearandloathing:

timbosan:

On the other hand the air quality monitor is quite good - has displays for time, co2, PM2.5, temp and humidity, and it's visible in Apple Home just like my Eve Room is. I will be getting more of these.

do you have any thing to compare them against? I saw a post on reddit, where someone had several, they all had different readings by some margin. They were all next to each other.

I had a couple of the TIMMERFLOTTE Temperature/humidity sensor, smart delivered on Friday, I have them sitting next to each other than a couple of fluctuations they seem relatively consistent.

Senecio

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#3501086 7-Jun-2026 18:55

DamageInc:

Morning all, genuine question - what purpose is a motion sensor in a room?

I just visited one of the links in this thread, IKEA Smart Home, and good lord i think i just opened up a rabbit hole lol.

Lights coming on in a hallway when you have to get up at 2am to go to the toilet.

Lights coming on in the Laundry when the cat needs to use her litte tray.

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#3501153 7-Jun-2026 21:29

I have the Bilresa switch with wheel and it is a POS. Philips hue system is far superior imo and have a relatively proven reliability over time. The ikea switch seems to need to ikea hub because you can’t use it with Google hub because each button ends up as a different device. Also ikeas instructions suck. I can pair it with the devices directly but sometime the button works and sometimes it doesn’t and if using it for more than one device the light coil ours or dimming go out of sync with one another. I see YouTube reviews have similar feedback and apparently overseas they seem to have stopped selling some of the items

richms

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#3501157 7-Jun-2026 22:40

My results are that the bulbs are fine but the colours are not good. Green is gross looking like the early hue lamps or those nasty filament style ones that use green covering over blue LEDs.

The grillplats socket works well, but OMG the remotes and motion sensors are useless. They go thru the ikea gateway when joined to lights or sockets in thread mode, and the lag is worse than my wifi ones some of the time.

Forget multi controller on them. It seems that every failed pairing attempt uses one of the slots on the device. I have found mixed info if its 3 or 5 controllers that the plugs and lights can be paired to, but I only suceeded in getting one light to work in ikea, google and amazon, and that was with it pairing on the first go, then trying to add to home assistant and it failed so I am inclined to believe its 3 matter controllers limit.

At some point I will be resetting them and only connecting to HA as the matter controller and see if that works any better.

I have a grilplatz at the back of the garage on a couple of powerstrips running things that dont need to be left on, and a bilressa stuck to the fridge by the door to trigger it. Basic setup, only added those devices to the ikea dirigera and set it up in the primitive UI they give. It works. Mostly. Sometimes. I have put the google streamer and nest speaker back on as ikea said in their firmware notes that multiple border routers is fixed, and all those devices are on the same ethernet vlan so the ipv6 link local should be working between them. I actually use those devices so dont want to unplug them just to fix thread problems.

Richard rich.ms

fe31nz

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#3501160 7-Jun-2026 23:22

DamageInc:

Morning all, genuine question - what purpose is a motion sensor in a room?

Working out when your mother (90, some dementia) got up in the morning so you can estimate when she took her pills and work out when she can safely have the next lot.

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#3501163 8-Jun-2026 02:35

DamageInc:

Morning all, genuine question - what purpose is a motion sensor in a room?

For us, motion sensors & smart LEDs has enabled a paradigm shift.
The old 'turn it off when you leave the room' is now 'never touch the light switch'.

Commonly used rooms are lit when you walk in, remain lit while you're there, and extinguish themselves 10-20 minutes after you leave.
Modulated, of course, by sunlight and considerations of evening/middle-of-the-night need for various levels of light.

As well, in this house with the kitchen quite remote from the HP hot water, I have a ring main that provides instant hot water when you turn on the hot tap. That is activated by the room motion sensor gated with a thermostat on the HW supply line. So, instead of wasting 60+ seconds of (tank) water to get HW, you get it automatically. You have to do other stuff for a minute of so - to let the HW arrive (around the ring pipe), but then it's instant at the tap. Then it stays hot (cycled/gated by the thermostat) while you're working in the kitchen and subsides (is allowed to chill off) when you leave.

I dreamed up that two-factor control myself, after simpler ring mains proved too energy hungry. In hotels, they just run 24/7 - but hotels have big budgets. A friend tried the always-on approach for a HW ring main in a house he built 20 years ago. It worked, but cost him a lot of power - not for the pump (less than 15W) but for the leakage of heat energy from the (heavily lagged) HW lines. Always hot, always losing heat.

So only having the ring main work when you're likely to want hot water works really well for us.

All of this is, of course, sheer laziness - but then so is the idea of having water piped into the house - and made warm for you without lighting a fire...

Chrisclarke

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Master Geek
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#3501190 8-Jun-2026 08:55

DamageInc:

Morning all, genuine question - what purpose is a motion sensor in a room?

I just visited one of the links in this thread, IKEA Smart Home, and good lord i think i just opened up a rabbit hole lol.

I'm always hearing of clever ways people are using them.. for me currently:

hall lights turn on dim if visiting bathroom during the night, then off again
outside lights come on when leaving the house (sensor is inside, so the lights are on before you exit, compared to the old outdoor sensor which meant you'd tripped down the steps before the light came on...)
(my favourite) turns the heatpump down or off after a set period of time when no one is in the room (also have sensors on the ranch sliders so if the kids leave it open the heating turns off)

Note I do use HomeKit to make things from different ecosystems work together - but all very do-able!

fearandloathing

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#3501197 8-Jun-2026 09:44

@jat80 no grafana, just home assistant history. I use an Apple TV via Home Assistant for my thread/matter hub thingy.

jat80

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#3501226 8-Jun-2026 11:20

fearandloathing:

@jat80 no grafana, just home assistant history. I use an Apple TV via Home Assistant for my thread/matter hub thingy.

That's actually a huge help. I don't use HA but wanted to get the data from the Ikea sensors into grafana. I have an Apple TV as my matter/thread hub as well and managed to (with the help of my mate Claude) create my own matter mqtt bridge on my raspberry pi. Saw that HA app exposes the thread credentials on my network so was able to get my data from that and feed it to my mate Claude to create my own hub. Paired my Ikea TIMMERFLOTTE sensor with that and now it's feeding me all the data at the same time it's sending it to HomeKit! These sensors are great value.

Obraik

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#3501328 8-Jun-2026 15:47

I've been running a couple of the air quality sensors, a temp/humidity sensor, a smart plug, a motion sensor, 3 pack of the remotes and a scroll wheel for around a month now. All have paired into Home Assistant (with Apple Home as the Thread border router) and I've had zero issues with them since pairing. There's also been a few updates come through for a number of them that HA has installed on them just fine as well.

Previously I had been using some cheap Zigbee temp/humidity sensors off AliExpress (the oblong style sensors that are pretty common) and while fine, their readings are pretty sporadic. The Ikea sensors are pretty much the same price and are far better with update frequency. Below shows one of the zigbee sensors in my Office vs a Ikea sensor in the Lounge (ignore the high temp, I need to find a permanent home that isn't in in the sun in the morning).

Overall, I'm pretty impressed with the offerings from Ikea for the price that they are. I'll most likely be getting more of the temp and air quality sensors to get replace the zigbee ones, while also being a cheap way to get air quality (CO2 and PM2.5) sensors.

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#3501331 8-Jun-2026 15:56

Dumb question: Is there any way to get HA working on say an existing Linux server we already have for other services and somehow getting the IKEA Matter devices (as these are the only ones sold in NZ AFAIK) to pair directly to said server via the Wifi? Or getting the Matter devices to pair directly to iPhones? Or is it 100% mandatory to get hardware like the HomePod to act as a go-between?

I have no desire for the HomePod, Apple TV, Amazon Alexa, etc as they all come with additional features we do not need and these are also quite expensive if I am only buying these to act as a simple router for Matter traffic. When I looked into it a while back it seemed that the easiest path to getting this up and running was to get one of these devices. I think the assumption by Apple/Amazon/et al is that a household would already have one of these so might as well add the Matter functionality to these (although the idea that it makes them more money that way is probably closer to the truth).

Is there no simple device that only communicates with Matter devices and relays it to e.g. Home Assistant, Home app, etc?

My household does have Apple iPhones and a Linux server so if we can use these existing stuff that would be great.

richms

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#3501335 8-Jun-2026 16:23

You need a thread border router device, google nest speaker with a screen or else the google tv streamer are 2 options that are actually useful for other things, otherwise there are USB sticks that can be flashed to do it like people run zigbee ones on their HA installation. Or just get the ikea dirigera hub to do it. Its wired ethernet tho so plan around that.

There seems to be a complete lack of cheap aliexpress thread devices at this stage, with all the stuff on there still being zigbee, probably because it doesnt need you to get your firmware blessed at a cost before you can get it running without warnings during provisioning.

Richard rich.ms

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#3501345 8-Jun-2026 16:48

An Apple TV is another good dual-use option for a border router. It's what I'm using

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#3501347 8-Jun-2026 16:51

richms:[snip] The grillplats socket works well, but OMG the remotes and motion sensors are useless. They go thru the ikea gateway when joined to lights or sockets in thread mode, and the lag is worse than my wifi ones some of the time.

I've got all 3 of those connected via thread to Apple Home. No significant lag from motion detection or button presses on the remote. The socket also responds quickly. I wonder if the delay you see is in the Ikea gateway?

The light sensor in the motion sensor isn't that great though, not enough resolution at the dark end of the scale and slow to react.

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