Teardown of a new Ikea Grillplats plug (potential always-on current monitor)

I’d recently made a post regarding the Ikea Inspelning plug in a thread where someone was looking for an always-on current monitor (no relay.) I found that those devices worked well, if you were willing to do a modification to the unit.

Ikea decided to drop ZigBee for some reason in favor of Matter, and with that, new devices. The replacement for the Inspelning is the Grillplats, a similar smart plug that has a Matter transceiver instead of a ZigBee unit. It’s a bit smaller, more packed in, and a little harder to get apart, but it can be modified to be always-on just as easily.

I’ve done a complete writeup regarding this unit on a personal project page with plenty of pictures. As always, there are lethal voltages inside these devices when operating, and you can cause death and property damage by improperly modifying units. If you don’t know how, don’t do it.

6 Likes

Hi, What do you mean by “always-on”? Shouldn’t they behave like this without any modification?

Also, does Energy in kWh value working as expected? Is it always increasing or is it erased every day?

Thanks

Yes I would like to know as well…

@JanCapek @wmaker see “always-on” described in more detail at https://wereboar.com/projects/index.php/2025/09/18/modifying-the-ikea-inspelning-smart-plug-for-always-on-operation/

They can also turn on and off, which means if you’ve connected something that relies on being powered on all the time, having an accidental trip that shuts it off could be problematic. My modification is to make the device permanently on… I want a power monitor, not a remote plug.

1 Like

Fwiw with sample size of 1, I found idle power consumption while on was 0.5W.

I measured with one US grillplats plugged into a 2nd US grillplats plugged into a nightlight (~3W power draw). Over 297397 seconds (~3.5 days) the 1st plug showed 284 Wh used, the 2nd showed 240 Wh used, meaning the 2nd plug used 284-240 = 44Wh. Then 44Wh / 3.5 days = 0.5W idle power consumption. Of course I don’t know how accurate these plug energy measurements are, but seems safe to say it consumes <1W.

Exactly what I was looking for, I only want to use it to monitor water pump usage but I don’t ever want it to accidentally turn off.

Note the Grillplats is only rated for tiny motors. Your water pump most likely exceeds the rating.