Has anyone used the Ikuu Zigbee range of switches with HA successfully?

Configuration Zigbee
21

Answering my own question: Yes, you can use the Ikuu Zigbee hub via Home Assistant.

The setup below will give you BOTH local control and Cloud connectivity at the same time with the standard hardware.

This gives full local control AND cloud control of your devices at the same time.

No device hacks, firmware flashes or custom gateways needed.

I wrote the guide here:

22

Ok, there are a few questions going on here, so I’ll try and break it down for you.

What I am looking for is a multi-gang set of switches that can also do dimming, but I am assuming that cannot be programmed afterwards?

Unfortunately Mercator do not have a multi-gang dimmer wall plate.
They do a 1-gang dimmer plate, and up to 6-gang switch plates, but not a 6-gang dimmer plate.

However, you can create your own by using Ikuu Dimmer Mechs.
You can fit up to 4 mechs on a standard wall plate.

These give you excellent flexibility to smarten up a single switch point, but keep the look and feel of a dumb switch.

If I go and buy a four gang switch, can I use HA to program different responses to button presses? ie, a press and hold, a double press, etc.?

Sort-of, but with a few caveats.

  • You cannot program things like double or triple press on any Ikuu (or Tuya) device, as far as I’m aware.
  • You CAN program the dimmers & switches for on, off, dim, timers, etc. Normal stuff.
  • You CAN program automations for any device in your network, based on the activation (on/off) of any switch or dimmer.

User Experiences:

  • The switch and dimmer mechs have nice physical push-button and dial mechanisms.
  • The wall plates have a capacitive touch switch.
  • The rotary dial mech is great for a normal (dumb) user experience, allowing a person to dial in their desired brightness manually or via the app.
  • The press button dimmer mech is great if you want it to generally work like a normal press-button switch, and occasionally want to set dimming modes via the app or Home Assistant.
    But it is annoying for someone who is trying to manually set their desired brightness. Needs multiple button presses and holds to try and get the dim level right.

I personally prefer the switch or dimmer mechs in most cases, but…
The multi-gang wall plates are great if:

  • you have more than 4 devices that you want to control from a switch plate.
  • you don’t need dimming. a 3-gang wall plate is cheaper than buying 3x mechs.
  • you have limited room behind the wall. The plates just need is a single active wire to power the unit.
  • you want to add an additional “scene” switch to an existing panel. e.g. one button is not connected to an electrical load and can be used to control another smart device or scene somewhere.

Hope this helps

24

Does anyone know if these ikuu zigbee rotary dimmers work with the phillips hue hub?

25

Hi There,

New to home automation and coming to grips with things. I started out with some tuya devices but now see that zigbee seems better due to no cloud involvement etc (had my first run-in with the developer account timing-out thing).

As I understand it, zigbee has three levels of device: hub, router and client.

Are these IKUU devices Zigbee routers? I have a very long and narrow house and the easiest place for me to put the zigbee hub is more or less at one end of the house. I will need a good spread of repeaters/routers to get good coverage for battery powered sensors etc - which I gather are just clients, not routers.

TIA

26

Tuya is the OEM manufacturer for several hundred white-label suppliers. They produce both Zigbee and WiFi devices.

Mercator Ikuu is one of those white-labelling suppliers. Mercator is a big Australian vendor who make a bunch of Australian-certified electrical products.
They sell both Tuya Zigbee and WiFi products under the “Ikuu” brand range.

You can generally buy the exact same Tuya-powered hardward devices from AliExpress, but the advantage of using Mercator Ikuu or Arlec GridConnect or Deta products from Bunnings are that they are Australian-Certified electrical products. Deploying anything else to your 240V household power circuit is illegal.

Are these IKUU devices Zigbee routers?

Repeaters: Some yes, some no. Generally the hard-wired devices are repeaters and clients, and the battery devices are just end-clients.
E.g. Light bulbs and switches are repeaters. Battery-powered Climate and Motion Sensors are not.

I started out with some tuya devices but now see that zigbee seems better due to no cloud involvement etc

Tuya Zigbee and WiFi devices do not /NEED/ cloud connectivity, but it does make the configuration easier.

Have a look at this excellent fork of Local Tuya.
This fork provides local connectivity to Tuya WiFi devices and (importantly!) support for local connectivity to Zigbee sub-devices behind a hub.
The bonus here is that it also provides dual-control via BOTH the Tuya Smartlife app and locally via Home Assistant at the same time, if that’s something that you want.

27

Unfortunately the switches are not repeaters. See here:
Link

Don’t regard this list as exhaustive. I would assume no switches are repeaters but e.g.the powerpoints are.

28

I have a number of these gpo’s. Whilst the internal ones have worked perfectly, I have found the external ones freeze to external input (ie. The switch on the device itself becomes non responsive on occasion). I’ve had this happen in two separate switches. A power cycle of the switch (off/on at the circuit is required) Mercator have offered warranty replacements but won’t tell me if the hardware or firmware will be different. Given this, I’m unwilling to put the same device in in replacement (of two devices).
Not sure if others have experienced this.

29

I agree, but have found the build quality of the local devices better. For example the screw terminals for the Deta switches are big enough for multiple wires. I originally had various AliExpress Wifi switches but have slowly replaced them all with the Deta switches (using Cloudcutter to make them local again). I am testing a zigbee Ikuu rotary dimmer as prefer to holding a button to go up and down brightness. So far so good but do find it slow to turn on both from the switch and via HA.

30

Hi Guys, i am based in Melbourne and I’m considering to change all the light switches across the house. I cant decide whether i should go down the path of putting shelly pucks with momentary switch or install smart switch like the ikuu. We have 1x 3way switch, 1x 4way switch and 2x 2way switch which complicates things a bit. Any recommendations if redoing all the switches? Currently we just have the clipsal c2000

31

I ended up going Shelly because it was going to be significantly cheaper than using the Ikuu range. We got 17 all up, and 3 of them are for 2 way switches (there’s multiple places to turn the lights on and off for a single room)

One thing with Shelly relays is the way they’re set up, for a 2 way switch, you only need 1 relay, not 2! So having the 2 way switches won’t complicate things from the Shelly point of view. That said, we’ve got a lounge area that’s quite large that we’ve sort of split it with one end being for the TV stuff and one end where I have my desk, all open plan, and two of the 2 way switches being for this area (so we can turn on either light from either end of the room). So one panel has 2 switches, which is for the lounge and office area, and the other panel has 3 - one for the hallway, lounge and office. When the electricians were installing the Shellys into there, they said they wouldn’t be able to fit 3 into there without making a mess, so decided to put 2 Shellys where the 3 gang is and 1 Shelly where the 2 gang is. From an end user it makes no difference, but just something to keep in mind

32

So are you saying we only need 1 for the 4way switching. Did you also change the buttons to momentary or keep the traditional ones.

I’m thinking for a 2 gang switch plate i would need $40 for the shelly and ~$20 for each of the push button and then cost for electrician, vs ikuu panel which might be easier to swap out and cost about $60 for the panel?

Also i have a couple of 6 and 5 gang wall plates so from your experience it might be harder to get 3 shelly behind them

33

Sorry, I missed the 3 and 4 way switch part in your original message - must have been too early in the morning for that!

So when you say 3 and 4 way switches, you mean that one light group has 3 or 4 different switches that you can turn on/off independently of each other? If so, as far as I can tell, one Shelly should be enough for it, but it might be worth seeing if you can confirm just to be 100% sure before getting the electrician out.

We decided to keep the traditional buttons, which helped reduce the cost even further. For the 5/6 gang wall plates, I’m not an electrician and have no idea how it works but maybe it might be best seeing what the electrician says? Just because it might have been a tight fit for us might not mean it’s a tight fit for everyone - maybe you’ve got more space there or something?

As for the cost, we ended up getting them for about $14 each (we just got the basic one, no dimming or anything fancy). We were already getting the electrician to do work for us so don’t have a specific price per unit installed, but we originally thought we wanted a Shelly on every light and got quoted for that, but then decided we didn’t want it on one particular light and got requoted for one unit less. The difference was ~$20, so we assume each one cost about $20 to install, but again your mileage may vary depending on other factors.

34

Yes that’s right, we have 2 of those light groups one with 4 switches and the other with 3 in different locations across the house.

We have a new house so not sure if there are any rules for such things. Im thinking I’ll try one of each in the bathrooms as its 2 gang.

It seems like it doesn’t matter so much which way i proceed if cost is not a problem.

I was hoping incase anyone had any advice advocating either of the option or strongly opposing.

35

Hey people who’ve used the rotary dimmers, is it possible to toggle them between dimming electrically and dimming via zigbee?

I want to install two, one to control dimmable downlights directly and another to control Hue bulbs wirelessly. The documentation on these is really sparse.