This article about Smarthome was created in friendly cooperation with IKEA and contains advertising.
It's been almost 5 months since we moved into our sky loft. To be honest, we still can't quite believe how lucky we are to be able to call this apartment our home. I really like to think back to the first few days in the apartment. It didn't take long for the furniture to find its place and the decorations to be distributed throughout the individual rooms. Our constant companion during these days was the sun, which flooded our living space with light and filled all the rooms.
First disillusionment
Sounds pretty idyllic, doesn't it? Don't worry, it didn't take long before we were faced with the first disappointment in our dream home come true. All we had to do was press the light switches, which are scattered all over the apartment. You could put it this way: from that moment on we had two options. Either sit in the almost dark with a light bulb or have the hall lit. There is definitely no shortage of light sources in the apartment. When they converted the attic 4 years ago, they meant well and installed additional spotlights and light strips in addition to the normal connections on the ceiling. You could say that the will was there, but unfortunately it failed in the implementation.
So the first thing we did was to break open walls and lay lamp cables under the plaster so that we could get the wall and ceiling lights we had brought with us to the right places. Unfortunately, this didn't produce the desired result. We were also annoyed that we had various ceiling spotlights spread throughout the apartment that we hadn't actually used. To be honest, we weren't really keen on having hall lighting like in the Elphi. Great, now what?
A solution must be found
It was time to brainstorm and think about what lighting needs to do for us. Since almost all of our living takes place in one room, namely our living/dining/kitchen area, we wanted to have different lighting for the different living situations. This includes, among other things:
- cozy light for watching TV
- romantic atmosphere at the dining table. This was a big problem recently, because we can't put up a ceiling light there because of the slope and theoretically we can only use the ceiling spotlight as lighting.
- reasonable light for cooking
- decent work light for the dining table, because we like to work there in the evenings
- and last but not least, a photogenic lighting atmosphere, since I often shoot the apartment for the blog.
Fortunately, Felix is very enthusiastic about technology and has always had a great interest in home automation, which is why the solution to our problem was relatively obvious: we need a smart home for our sky loft! The only problem: our ceiling has one spotlight installed at 120cm intervals. In the living room, there are even two rows. On top of that, we would like to have different mood lights. You can now put two and two together and you will see that 95 square meters of living space means a lot of light bulbs. In addition, we are both fans of Apple, which is why a smooth Apple Homekit integration would be important. Money, I see you dwindling...
If you seek, you will find
With all of these requirements in mind, we started looking for a suitable smart home provider and finally found one at IKEA . IKEA's smart home met all of our requirements at a reasonable price. Phew! So we didn't hesitate and paid the Swede a visit. It felt like we bought the entire TRÅDFRI series:
- Ceiling spotlights: GU10 400 lm, wireless dimmable, white spectrum
- Wall/floor lamps: E27 600 lm, wirelessly dimmable, color and white spectrum opal white
- Bolia ceiling light: E14 400 lm, wirelessly dimmable warm daylight, candle-shaped opal white (here we paid attention to the shape (drop-shaped) because it is visible.)
- remote control
Since we wanted to connect the light bulbs to the Apple Homekit, the gateway was a must. We also bought a signal amplifier for a small price, since the range is otherwise only 10m. It wouldn't be a problem if our living area wasn't around 45 square meters. Whoopsie!
Let there be light
With a large bag of lightbulbs in his luggage, he quickly went home because the man of the house could hardly wait to install all the lightbulbs. What Christmas is for others, setting up the smart home system was for Felix. With a big grin on his face, he installed everything in no time at all using the IKEA app. The statement "super simple" was heard quite often. To integrate it into the Apple Homekit, all you had to do was scan the code on the back of the gateway and hey presto, everything was connected.
Okay, that's really simple! The difficult part came later. Suddenly we had various options for lighting the room. You have to know: I love soft indirect light, while Felix is a fan of hard, directional light. You can probably imagine that it took a while until we agreed on the perfect light. Well, to be honest, we're still trying out different settings.
While Felix was initially the main one who was excited about it, I now love the fact that the brightness and color of each individual light bulb can be individually adjusted using the phone. It might sound like a bit of work, but luckily you can save scenes and call them up again and again. Our saved scenes include "evening," "eating," and "cooking." And the whole thing is voice controlled. This has recently led to the last sentence before falling asleep no longer being "sleep well, honey," but "Hey Siri, turn off the light!" Sorry Felix, it's your own fault!
You'll probably notice straight away: we're absolutely thrilled! We never thought it would be so easy to change our disillusionment with the lighting when we moved in. I would say that this won't be the last smart home product in our apartment. An iPad as a central control center is already in the mail (Felix couldn't resist) and we're thinking about investing in motion detectors and sockets from the TRÅDFRI series. After all, how brilliant would it be if the light in the bathroom came on automatically as soon as you entered the room. Or if the coffee machine started up as soon as the alarm went off? Or or or...
