Avoid IKEA smart light products!

Third party integrations
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Just heads up here if you are planning to buy some Ikea smart lights. Encountering it myself and doing research into this issue it seems like Ikea lights will by default give you a massive headache when you try to integrate them into your smart home system.
The main issue is that they are unable to change brightness and color at the same time. So when your automation issues a basic command of changing the brightness and color, the light will do only one, ignoring the other. I’ve been having issues with separating both commands as well but I haven’t done much testing yet.
This doesn’t seem to be a bug but rather a feature, probably some cost saving measure. From what I could found it has been like that since 2018 and has not been fixed in any of the newest products.

2 Likes
2

Hi,
It would help the community considerably if you were more specific:

  • Which IKEA product exactly?
  • Which protocol (likely Zigbgee)?
  • Which HASS integration? (ZHA / Z2MQTT / other)?

Some Zigbee products require “quirks” files to make the device work despite incorrect or incomplete interface definitions in the device itself. Logging the manufacturer and device ID with the undesired behaviour can get the behaviour fixed - something that FOSS does very well.

Here’s an example of ZHA patching around a bad light with a quirk:

James

3

Never bothered me, but it obviously bothers you.

4

Hey, here are the details

  • It seems like all the smart light products by IKEA are affected. I have two Tradfri bulbs and ORMANÄS lightstrip. I’ve observe this behavior in all the products.
  • The protocol is Zigbee
  • I am currently using ZHA however I’ve been observing this issue before HA when I was adding the bulbs through my Hue Hub.

Here are some other observations of the issue I could found:

Thank you for the link to quirks, I will look into them later.

5

if you want more:

6

Found some workaround, going to test it in the evening but it is far from perfect: Setting color temperature and brightness of IKEA Tradfri lights simultaneously with Home Assistant | Wouter Bulten

7

I’ve encountered this problem as well with the “TRADFRI bulb E26/27, white spectrum, globe, opal, 1055/1100/1160 lm” firmware version 1.0.012. It was very difficult to debug without knowing this specific quirk, so thank you for posting this.

Once one is aware of the quirk, the workaround posted above is quite simple and does the trick. For example, to transition my two bulbs off-to-on with the same time-dependent color temperature (warm for night, cool for day) from start to finish, I write,

- sequence:
    - choose:
        - conditions:
            - condition: state
              entity_id: sun.sun
              state: above_horizon
          sequence:
            - parallel:
                - action: light.turn_on
                  metadata: {}
                  data:
                    kelvin: 3401
                    brightness_pct: 1
                  target:
                    entity_id: light.bulb_tunable_dimmable_ikea_lamp
                - action: light.turn_on
                  metadata: {}
                  data:
                    brightness_pct: 1
                    kelvin: 3401
                  target:
                    entity_id: light.bulb_tunable_ikea_table
        - conditions:
            - condition: state
              entity_id: sun.sun
              state: below_horizon
          sequence:
            - parallel:
                - action: light.turn_on
                  metadata: {}
                  data:
                    brightness_pct: 1
                    kelvin: 2801
                  target:
                    entity_id: light.bulb_tunable_dimmable_ikea_lamp
                - action: light.turn_on
                  metadata: {}
                  data:
                    brightness_pct: 1
                    kelvin: 2801
                  target:
                    entity_id: light.bulb_tunable_ikea_table
    - delay: "00:00:01"
    - parallel:
        - action: light.turn_on
          metadata: {}
          data:
            transition: 5
            brightness_pct: 100
            entity_id: light.bulb_tunable_dimmable_ikea_lamp
        - action: light.turn_on
          metadata: {}
          data:
            transition: 5
            brightness_pct: 100
            entity_id: light.bulb_tunable_ikea_table