- Hello and welcome to the show!
My name is Alex and this is TechFlow.
Today, we're going to be talking about IKEA's smart lighting system.
So let's get straight in to this.
So whether I'm saying this right or not, around a year ago, I did a video on this system,
the Ikea Tradfri, sort of smart lighting, home implementation type of devices.
You have a hub here which communicates with different devices like non-colour changing
lights and colour changing lights and they also do a smart plug now and different bits
and bobs like that, but if you watch that video I did a year ago of this stuff, when
it first came out, well, it wasn't very good.
It didn't work very well.
I told you guys not to buy it.
So for the last year, because of that bad experience, these things have been sat in
my cupboard collecting dust, up until around two months ago where I got them back out to
give them a second chance, updated all of their firmware and this is my experience.
So before we go ahead and install of these lights and see how they work and what they
can do, we need to set a base for this video and that base is the price.
What we're going to go ahead and do is compare these to the industry leaders - the Philips Hue.
So this is the warm and opal white variant of the lights - so this doesn't change colour.
We've got two of these and they're £9 each, so we'll add two of these to our basket.
So we'll push both of these off now to one side.
We need to add two of the colour changing variants here, so let's scroll down.
I think they're £22 - yep, right here.
And now we need the IKEA Bridge.
This is called the Tradfri Bridge and essentially this is what you need - you connect it to
your modem and then this goes ahead and communicates with the lights.
So for the exact same set up that I've got here with IKEA, for two of these Kelvin changing
lights and then two of these colour changing lights and the Bridge, we're looking at a
grand total of £174.97 which gives us a saving of, well, around £72 to £73 which, over
on IKEA, you could get a fair few more lights for that.
Ha!
Okay.
This looks like a winner if it works.
So essentially you need this puck, which I've already explained and I'll show you guys how
to link it.
But as you guys can see, this now works with the puck so you don't need the Bridge - all
you do is link of all of the lights with this puck.
You can go ahead and change the colour, the brightness with this puck and essentially,
if you take the back off the puck, there's a little button under there which you hold
near the lights for about ten seconds.
The light will flash and then it's connected to the puck.
So as you guys can see, we've got one, two, three, four lights so far.
This'll be the fifth.
So what we're going to go ahead and do now is open up the IKEA Tradfri app on my phone
and as you guys can see, I've already got one light installed.
That's actually a panel light, which is lighting this side of my face.
I'm not sure if you guys can see that or not as I toggle it on and off.
What we're going to go ahead and do is add this puck which controls the other five lights
in this room.
So to do that, we click the settings icon, we click on to devices and then we click the
plus button.
It's going to ask us what we are trying to add, so we're going to add the remote control.
And then once you've done that, you're going to want to go ahead and find the gateway with
its ethernet port and power plugged in to it, to a power port.
By the way, it's powered by USB, which is awesome.
Hold this for ten seconds next to the gateway.
You'll get a prompt on your phone saying "device found" and then it'll ask you to wait for
a quick second and there you go.
It's done.
You can then go ahead and rename the remote controls, so I'll just rename this "office control."
So next it says to turn on your light, well we'll use this one as a demonstration.
It's already on.
We'll go ahead and click next on here.
We're going to say this controller because it, well, looks like this one - it's the one
we're using.
We're going to click next and now it's asking us to hold the puck near the bulb again like
we did the first time and hold it for ten seconds.
I'm going to take the cover off this light, press and hold for ten seconds and you'll
see the light dim and there you go - as you guys can see, please wait for a moment, device
found - and then shortly after, it will ask us to re-name our new bulb.
And now you just go ahead and repeat this step for every single one of the bulbs.
Cool.
All of our lights are added.
So there we go, I've added our five bulbs in to one room in the app which I've called
"Main Office" as you guys can see right here.
If I go ahead and click the button, it toggles off all of the lights in here and I can turn
them back on again.
I can also go ahead and change things like the colour temperature of, well, these bulbs.
So you can go all of the way from warm white to, well, white white or light white and then
you can go ahead and change to all of these different colours.
So you can have purple, orange, pink.
Absolutely, well, pretty much anything under the sun that you need.
And these lights should be exactly the same.
So I should be able to go on to PC Left and change that there and then go on to PC Right
and change that just as easily.
There we go - those are the colour changing bulbs.
They're pretty bright - 600 lumens.
A problem for these cheap smart bulbs is actually getting them right when they are in colour
mode which, yeah, these ones are more than adequate.
I'm happy for the price that I would have paid for these.
And then, as far as these lights are concerned, these aren't the colour changing ones, however,
you can get an extra 400 lumens of brightness - you can change the brightness of these lights.
No colour changing though, but you still get the control on here.
So if we turn that off, does it work with Google Home?
(Beep) Turn on the office lights.
- [Google Home] Sure, turning thirteen lights on.
- Okay, so I think the burning question is: Do you save yourself the £70 from Philips Hue
and get this IKEA set up?
You've got a few things that you need to consider.
The main one being the type of lights that you need.
Now, if you go over to IKEA's website - I'll drop the link in the description - you can
see what type of bulb fittings they have.
Now they pretty much cover everything all the way from bayonet to sort of GU10 to candlelight
but when I'm saying the "type of lights," I mean that Philips Hue do loads of lights.
They do bloom lights, they do LED strips.
These are things that you can't find yet anyway over on the IKEA system.
They make more industrial lights like light panels that work absolutely fine with this system.
So it depends on what lights you want.
But as far as the actual usability of the system goes, for saving yourself £70,
you can't really go wrong in 2019.
I wouldn't have said that two years ago though but these guys, well they've definitely caught up.
So we'll leave the links in the description but for now, my name has been Alex, this has
been TechFlow and we'll catch you in the next one.
Adios.