TESTING IKEA’s NEW MATTER SMART HOME DEVICES ON HOME ASSISTANT! 

Late last year IKEA announced a whole bunch of new bits of smart home tech – and specifically they all use Matter over Thread. That includes light bulbs, smart buttons, door and window sensors, motion sensors, temp sensors, and even a water leakage sensor. Oh, and a smart plug, although that doesn’t appear to be available in the UK yet, although I believe is available in the US already. Now you might be looking at the list I’m showing, then looking at this pile of boxes and thinking… that isn’t all the stuff, is it? No. I bought all of this with my own money, and a number of the things – especially lightbulbs – I either don’t have a way to use them at all, or really don’t need them, and I also didn’t get the water leakage sensor or temperature sensor because those are already out of stock. I actually had to drive 45 miles each way just to get two of these bits, so I’ve got what I can actually use. Screw wasteful consumerism as much as possible.

So, what have we actually got here? Let me start with what I think is the true star of the show here, the Alpstuga. This thing is a tiny clock, temperature and humidity sensor, and most importantly, a CO2 and PM2.5 sensor. For just £25 this thing is insane. Want to know how I know that? I’M MAKING A ZIGBEE CO2 SENSOR AND THE SENSOR THIS THING USES COSTS £5 PER UNIT (IF YOU BUY THE WHOLE REEL, for me it’s more like £6 per unit) ALONE! The particulate matter sensor is the old style that uses a little (functionally silent) fan so that’s cheaper than the Bosch BMV080 I want to use (which is £25 per unit just for the sensor, although that does PM1, 2.5 and 10…), so yeah I can tell you that this thing is not just competitively priced, it’s aggressively priced. This STCC4 sensor from Sensiron is opening a lot of doors for home CO2 monitoring, and I’m so here for it.  

This thing updates at least the CO2 level (parts per million) every ten seconds – that might be a little excessive, but it’s damn cool – whereas the particulate matter is more like once a minute (I think it’s every 50 seconds specifically). That is a load of really useful data, although the amazing thing about this is also a little display! It’s a muted white light, which as far as I can tell never turns off so this might not be a great choice for your bedroom – although it is meant to adjust the brightness to the ‘room level’. Anyway, this is amazing for it being a standalone bit of kit, let alone being a smart device you can get history from. Unsurprisingly, the CO2 sensor in here agrees with my own dev board version with the same sensor, as does the temperature and humidity sensor side. It seems pretty accurate, and crazy fast to update too. The only downside to this thing really is that it has a fan for the PM2.5 sensor. That’s it. This thing is an absolute steal – and for it to be a Matter Over Thread device? Hot damn. Buy one now. Buy one while you can. It works great with Home Assistant too, and can even have its firmware updated through Home Assistant (with a few tries anyway). Great stuff.

Next, the motion sensor. This Myggspray sensor is a motion sensor, a PIR, not a presence sensor (see my video in the cards above for more on the difference), so it isn’t the fastest, and but it works well, and importantly for me this also has a light level sensor built in that reports in lux. That’s crucial for me because you don’t want your home assistant automations to turn your lights on when there’s bright light outside. You only want it on when you need it, and this lets you do that really easily. I also want to note just how clever and well designed the housing is. If you want to mount this thing, it’s pretty obvious that you can screw it to your wall. There’s a hole on the back for that. Except, they’ve specifically designed the backer with two 45 degree angles and mounting holes there too, so if you want it sitting at an angle from the wall, the option is built right in. Brilliant. If you pop the cover off you’ll also find two adhesive strips, so you can also just stick it to the wall if you’d prefer, and then they’ve also made sure the base has a big flat spot on it so you can also just place it down if you’d rather stick it on a shelf or something. That is genius. This uses two AAA batteries, meaning battery life should be measured in years, unlike the ones powered by coin cells, so that’s another strong plus. Oh, and I should mention this thing is just £7. SEVEN! That is incredible value – that beats anything even from Aliexpress! That’s incredible.

Then there’s the Myggbett, the door and window sensor. This thing takes just one AAA battery, and comes in two parts, the magnet and the sensor. The magnet goes on your door or window, and the sensor goes on the frame right next to it, and as you open the door it sends a ping to Home Assistant to say the door is opened, and when it’s closed, you guessed it, it reports you closed it. This is actually a really useful sensor, both potentially for security, but moreso for convenience. Maybe have it turn your hallway light on when the door opens, or turn the heating down, or if you have smart TRVs like I do have it turn that rad off until you’ve closed the door or window. There’s lots of uses, and again for just £7? That’s incredible value. And for a fully internet free device too, I love it.

Carrying on with input devices, the Bilresa’s. I have FOUR Bilresa’s, although confusingly there are actually eight different versions of the Bilresa – two button (four colour ways) or a scroll wheel (four colour ways). You can either get the white one of each, or buy a three pack with green, red and cream. I went for the three pack of the dual button ones (for just £10 for three?!?!) and one scroll wheel one (for just £4!?!?!?!), and my god these things are cool. So the dual button ones are pretty sleek, using dual AAA batteries, and obviously reporting two button entities in HASS. They also use magnetic mounting with a thin steel plate on the back that you can stick to whatever you want and makes these nicely mobile, but since the magnet is in the switch, if you have a metal shelf or something you can just clip it to the side without the plate. Pretty handy! But the award for coolest thing so far has to go to the scroll wheel version. This also has magnetic mounting and uses two AAA batteries, but first, the scroll wheel feels great. It’s tactile and clicky – exactly what you want – and you have a button in the middle so if you want to use this for controlling a light not only for on/off, but brightness? This can do that. Except, see those little dots on the front? Yeah so it turns out if you click the hidden button on the bottom of the body, that actually cycles through THREE layers. So you can control three lights, or one light’s brightness AND colour temperature, or a light, your central heating and the volume on your TV (assuming HASS has access to that anyway). All from one £4 Matter over Thread remote. I love this so much. It’s so cool.

Speaking of lights, the smart bulbs I bought were Kajplats, specifically the E14 socket ones which only do colour temperature control, but that’s really all I want in a lightbulb anyway. They are just £5 per bulb – that’s like the same sort of cost buying regular LED bulbs from Tesco, so the fact these have a Matter over Thread controller in here too is just mind blowing. They are also brilliant – they are bright, have a great colour range, and have more than granular enough control. These are a great improvement for my office, at least with the wall sconces I somewhat inherited anyway. 

I feel it’s worth mentioning the Home Assistant side of things too. As detailed in a previous video (in the cards for you), my Matter setup is fairly simple. I have a Sonoff Zigbee dongle (the EFR32 version) flashed with the OpenThread firmware acting as the Thread Border Router, and then I have a couple of Matter over Thread devices already – namely an EVE smart plug and a Nanoleaf bulb. That’s it. Adding devices was smooth once I found out I had to go into the companion app settings and sync Thread credentials, every single device connected without issue, reported correctly, and at least from my limited testing thus far has been stable on the network. All of this stuff is amazing, and ludicrously well priced. If you are on the fence about these bits, I’d highly recommend biting the bullet on them. Stock seems to come and go pretty quickly, so grab ‘em while you can. If you’ve only got Zigbee devices right now, these might not be for you. As someone who runs both, it’s a little annoying they are all using the same frequency and yet not working together, although I am happily using both so I’ll leave that one up to you. In short, these are an incredible value, and seem to be great quality too, so yeah, great job IKEA. This feels like money well spent.