IKEA Home smart

Works great! I got my Dirigera hub secondhand, and my first Kajplats bulb with a lamp from the As-is area of my local IKEA warehouse. One small/odd issue I’ve found is that between 60% and 99% brightness, my bulb turns green if I have it set to red. At 100% brightness and at or below 59% it correctly shines red. Not sure if this is weirdness with the bulb or the app. I suspect the bulb. I didn’t expect the setup process to be without issues considering the provenance of my bridge and bulb, and I wasn’t wrong. Setup took several tries, but did eventually succeed after a bit of repetition and process refinement. My advice to others is a failure doesn’t mean it’s broken or you did anything wrong, it just does that sometimes, even if you get all the steps right. Patience pays off with this equipment.

IKEA has managed to make a simple and mostly reliable app for all of its devices. Responsiveness and connectivity with HomeKit is perfect but the app does lack deeper features compared to competing platforms. Things such as detailed energy monitoring and charts. Bulb controls are almost a little too simplified and lack customization for colored bulbs such as themes and effects. All too often I experience the hub disconnecting from the app but a simple refresh fixes it. If IKEA is reading, please keep refining and adding features for future updates.

I bought IKEA’s smart blinds which are my first foray into the company’s smart ecosystem. They said it was compatible with Google Home but that I needed to buy their hub to enable functionality. Fine. I’ll tell you, set up was not simple. I had to reconfigure my router setup in order to get the hub to connect to my router. Once I did that, it setup fine but just getting to that point was a bunch of trial and error. Next came setting the maximum length of the blinds. Currently the two blinds I have are about a centimeter different which really bothers me, but there seems to be no way to adjust them without completely deleting the blind and re-adding it. I’m willing to just tolerate it to keep my sanity. All the above I can live with, they’re small things. But the one thing that has upset me more than anything is that about 50% of the time, my automations don’t work. They just refuse to close at sunset like I’ve programmed without me telling Google to close them. I know I did it right because it did it a few times the first few days I owned the blinds. The reason this upsets me so much is because IKEA could have made these blinds to enable Google automations, but they didn’t. I can only do automations through IKEA’s app, which obviously isn’t working. If IKEA would simply allow Google to do it, it would work fine. So until they fix this junky app and their hardware to allow me to do the one thing with my blinds that I wanted (open them at sunrise, close them at sunset), they’re lucky they get a second star from me.