Over the past holiday period, we decided to overhaul our dressing room.
We had an Ikea PAX wardrobe equipped with standard led strips and a dumb switch. So for the upgrade, we deciced not only to expand the closet space, but also to make the lighting more extensive and smart.
I had also still had an IKEA TRÅDFRI driver still laying around from another project and some spare 24V LED strips from our house renovation so I decided to test their compatibility.
I bought a VÅGDAL Connection cord, cut the connector of and exposed the 2 wire and connected those with some WAGO clips to the leads of the LED strip.
Low and behold: they work perfectly together.
The TRÅDFRI driver is Zigbee, so it allows me to control on/off and dimming of the LED strip through Zigbee2MQTT.
Some warnings for people who want to try this themselves:
The TRÅDFRI drivers have a max wattage of 30W in total output.
Although they have 9 ports to connect leads to, make sure that you don’t put all 30W on 1 port.
The highest wattage single light that connects to this system that IKEA sells today is an 8W LED kitchen light. So i kept this in mind as a safety margin.
Some picture of the work in progress:
Adding strips to the bottom of the shelves:
(P.S.: the pruning shears are to cut the MONTERA Cable trunking )
Mounting everything to the PAX wardrobe:
And turning the cable spaghetti into something more manageable:
More or less finished result:
I screwed all PAX units together and to the wall. Then finished the remaining gaps with MDF for a built-in look. Still needs some paint to finish it completely.
The LED drivers and cables all come together on the top (During the renovation, I put some 230V sockets above this height especially for this purpose). They are not visible from normal standing height, but to prevent dust build-up and to make use of the left over room, another set of closets will eventually be set on top. The drivers will get their own space in those.
(P.S.: yes, It was still a mess at this stage. We hadn’t moved everything to their new places yet.)
