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With more clever kit hitting the shelves, Ikea is determined to lead the smart home revolution
SLOWLY but surely, inch by inch, Ikea’s bid to be the centrepiece of your smart home is coming together.
The latest “devices” to join the Ikea Home family are smart blinds, which have been in the works for a while. They join the lights and plug sockets that kicked off the collection and the wi-fi speakers that joined later.
Ikea won’t stop here, of course – it has said it will put making smart home products at the centre of its strategy for years to come.
The platform is already maturing at a steady rate and has two factors that make it a compelling system to get on board with.
First is the price – the components of the system are a lot cheaper than you might find elsewhere. Second is the fact that, by and large, everything works with all three of the big tech’s AI assistants – Alexa, Siri and the Google Assistant. And if they don’t work with all three, support is in the works. That will make it much easier to switch from one platform to another in the future or use more than one of them in your home.
Here’s a quick round up of what the Ikea Home system offers and how it can work for you.
BLINDS
IKEA’S smart blinds have just hit the stores and come in two varieties with typically Ikea names – Kadrilj blinds are priced between £99 and £129 depending on the size and are regular roller blinds. Fyrtur cost between £115 and £165 and are more substantial blackout blinds.
Both are battery operated and come with remote controls so you can open and close them from across the room without any smart home stuff involved.
But if you connect the blinds up to an Ikea Home network, you can control them via a smartphone app, which allows you to schedule opening and closing of the blinds, and offers voice control via smart speakers. At the moment the blinds only work with the Google Assistant but support for Siri and Alexa is on the way.
How to connect them up to an Ikea Home system? Read on…
HUB, BULBS AND PLUGS
THE heart of Ikea’s system is the Tradfri gateway (£25). This is a hub that plugs into your wi-fi router at home and allows communication with, and control of, all the smart home accessories around the house.
It’s pretty simple to set up and once it’s connected to the Ikea Home app on your phone, you can start to add devices to the network.
There are two main components available at the moment – bulbs start at £7, and only the screw-in type are available, except for the spotlights which have the two-pin connections.
Most UK houses will have bayonet light fittings wired into ceilings, but Edison-screw standalone lamps around the house are becoming more common, largely because Ikea sells nothing else…
Anyway, these bulbs screw into to your lamps and light fittings and then need to be paired with the system – which requires the other essential element for the Tradfri system: some kind of remote control.
Ikea sells a couple of different kinds – a simple dimmer switch that you can stick to your wall at £6 or a full remote control for £15.
Either way you have to go through the rather clumsy set-up system of holding a switch down in the remote and holding it close to the gateway to pair it to the system.
You then have to hold the same switch down in the remote and hold it close to any device you want to add to the network to pair those up too. It doesn’t take long, but it is an extra step other systems don’t require.
Once your devices are connected to the network, you can put the remote away and just use the Ikea Home app to control the lights – they are dimmable and you can also change the colour temperature of the bulbs from warm to white. Ikea also sells a nine-colour bulb for £22.
The second component available is a simple plug socket, which costs a remarkably cheap £10.
This plugs into the wall socket and you then plug your lamp – or any other device for that matter – into it to gain smart control over it.
The magic really begins to happen when you allow Alexa, Siri, or the Google Assistant to take control of the system – you can group devices together, schedule on and off times, set scenes to change the brightness and warmth of lights and you can control everything just by speaking.
It’s a great and cheap way to get into the smart home world and Ikea even offers kits with all you need to get started at a discount to what you would pay if you bought components separately.
Ikea also offers wi-fi connected speakers, Symfonisk, built in collaboration with Sonos. These devices are not smart (they do not offer access to any voice AI assistants) but they connect to the internet via wi-fi and can be controlled by the Sonos app. The Symfonisk bookshelf speaker costs £99, while the lamp speaker is £150. For more about Ikea’s Smart Home initiative see ikea.com