Ikea makes some of the best smart home stuff IMO. Really well built, decently priced and no stupid lock in or cloud only stuff.
this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2024
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Every single bulb in my home is from IKEA and i was really happy with how easily they are to be integrated.
Sadly they aren't repeaters for the regular zigbee network, only for other IKEA devices.
They definitely are repeaters. I had issues with a Moe's ZigBee dimmer. It turned out it was relaying off of an IKEA bulb. When that lamp got turned off at the switch, it killed the link. I ended up using a smart plug as a repeater.
I second this statement. Most of my bulbs are IKEA. I have 4 floors and my ZigBee dongle is on the ground. If they weren't repeaters, my Aqara motion sensors wouldn't be working, but they do!
Anyway to check this via the HA dashboard?
Interesting... are you using Zigbee2MQTT? Because i am on ZHA and looking at my network visualization none of my aqara devices connect to the IKEA bulbs. Only other IKEA bulbs connect to them in my case.
I have some temperature sensors from aqara, some movement sensors and some multi buttons and they didn't connect to them. I had to buy some smart-plugs to act as repeaters.
Z2M, and it was definitely routing via the bulb. The ZigBee dimmer unit couldn't reach the coordinator directly (I might have mounted it in a metal wall box, with a metal front plate). It was connecting to the bulb and working fine however. When the bulb was off, the dimmer completely lost connectivity.
It might only be some of their bulbs, but they can definitely act as repeaters.
Interesting.
I remember having constant disconnects with my several aqara devices when i only had a path of bulbs to connect to. Those bulbs have constant power and are not turned off.
And when checking ZHA visualization i saw that they don't connect to the bulbs but rather tried to connect directly to my stick but only got minimal connection because of the distance. No matter what i tried, they would not connect to the bulbs
Bulbs don't usually work well as repeaters anyway. Their smart plugs tend to work well, although I wish they had power monitoring support.
The aqara plugs do have power monitoring but afaik it's borked with ZHA unless you write your own quirks file....
Better than that, if you are after more than one (and with GU10s, who isn’t?)
This gives you 3 bulbs and a handy remote that also works with HA.