Kjellerstue/Basement Living Room

This room contains solutions for the following systems (notice that on phones, the table might only be displayed in landscape mode):

Description of the solutions in this room

The primary solution for lighting consisted of a ceiling lamp which had a traditional E27 socket bulb. For a long time, this was replaced with a smart bulb, but in a larger room, the light was a bit dim. The whole lamp was therefore replaced by a Calex smart lamp, see picture below. This is very bright, 2,350 lumen at maximum brightness, and is based on Tuya so easily integratable into Apple Home via Homebridge.

For a long time, this ceiling lamp was controlled using a Philips Hue motion sensor, but this is a room where the cats of the house often play and thus triggering the sensor despite no people being in the room. It was hard avoiding this, despite adjustments to the placement of the sensor, but then Aqara launched a so-called human presence sensor, which was installed, see picture. A couple of things are worth mentioning about this sensor, though:

• Partly this sensor works somewhat differently from a traditional motion sensor. The latter responds more quickly in turning on the light when someone enters the room, but with the mentioned drawback that it can respond to pets as well as turning off the light if people are in the room, but stay still. The presence sensor has the advantages that it is much less sensitive for pets and also that it understands that someone is present in the room even when motionless, but with the drawback that it takes a little longer to respond when someone enters the zone.

• Another issue with this very sensor is that at least toward the end of 2022, it was only available to purchase from Chinese online stores. Aqara products are region-locked, which means that this sensor will not appear as an option in the Aqara app when adding a new device if the base station in set to a non-Chinese region. This can be easily solved, though, by first pushing the front button on the base station three times (this sets it in pairing mode), then pressing the connection button the sensor for five seconds.

Unfortunately, it soon turned out that only using the presence sensor was not fully functional; partly it responds quite more slowly than a regular motion sensor and partly it was difficult to place it so that it would both detect somebody entering the room and someone sitting in the sofa. Thus, a new Philips Hue motion sensor was installed. This is positioned to primarily detect entry into the room (and then turn on the light), while the presence sensor has as its primary function to detect somebody being in the “sofa section” of the room (and then keep the light on as long as someone is there).

Furthermore, we had several other light sources in this room; a floor lamp, a wall lamp, a table lamp, a “cat lamp”, and a china cabinet lamp, see pictures below. Since we rarely use this room for anything but as a passageway to the laundry room, we had for a long time not invested in smartening up these lights and they could only be operated using their respective “manual” switches. However, first IKEA lunched their inexpensive smart plug (called control outlet) and later a set containing a smart plug and switch, where a mounting bracket can be installed wherever you like and then the switch itself put onto the plate where it is held in place by a magnet. The switch can control different devices, both control outlets and bulbs, so we have now set up a solution where the these light sources are connected using two smart plugs. The switch is, as shown below, mounted on the wall inside the door and turns on/off all these lights as well as the ceiling lamp.

When achieving smart lighting using smart bulbs, there is one challenge–if someone turns off the physical light switch, be it a wall switch, cord switch, or switch on the actual lamp, the smart bulb loses its connection and not be remote controlled. Two possible solutions to this is replacing the physical switch with a smart switch or installing a smart relay switch behind the old switch (both solutions of course only works for wall switches). The solution chosen here was a smart switch from Aqara, see picture below. So even if someone inadverdently turns off the switch, it is possible to turn the light on again using the relay.

As mentioned, the “programming” of IKEA’s bulbs and control devices is quite different from other ecosystems. It is not possible to define routines of triggers and actions, one must define which light source is to be controlled by using the IKEA app and assigning devices (and thus only IKEA products can be controlled). This is the reason why we had to move the Trådfri motion sensor that used to be in this room, otherwise detected motion would either turn on all the lights in the room or the magnetic switch could not have been set up to turn off all the lights.

The electrical underfloor heating, underneath the pine floor, is controlled by a Meross smart thermostat in the house, also shown in the picture further up. Here, there is no separate floor temperature sensor, but this solution works well just using the built-in sensor in the thermostat.

This room is adjacent to the hallway and there is no door between them, only a portal, and we have a curtain here that can be closed. The basement living room is not much in use so there is no point in keeping it heated, which means it is useful to be able to close the curtain to avoid that this influences the rest of the house. For a long time, we had to open and close the curtain manually, but we now have installed an Aqara curtain driver, ses pictures below. This required replacing the curtain rod, since the driver requires a rod of fairly thick diameter, but beyond this it was very easy to install, with automatic detection of the end points. This is automatically controlled based on the temperature in the room (it closes under the set threshold and opens above) and partly based on the time of day (so that the curtain is open during periods of the day).

A product now removed was a Mi Air Purifier 2S. It was originally located in the living room, but startet making so much noise after a while that it was moved to a less used room. Eventually it got so noisy I returned it.

Next, there are some base stations located in this room, first Athom Homey here, see picture below to the left. This is a base station with support for many different protocols. Many devices are connected to it. It has a function for “screen saver”, which makes nice colors, but this is turned off so as not to have a disco in the basement living room.

When installing a Meross smoke detector in the garage, an attached smart hub was required, and this was placed here, see picture below.

Furthermore, we have a UniFi 6 Pro access point for the mesh network, shown below.

It is somewhat of a coincidence that these base stations have ended up in this room, but it is also a matter of unused power outlets as well as the fact that the lady of the house doesn’t find all of these device to be very good-looking. Therefore our Aqara M2 Hub is a little hidden away here, see picture below. Originally we had a different type of base station, an M1S, but due to some problems with responsiveness we upgraded it to an M2, which can be connected to ethernet.

The reason why the Aqara hub was placed in the book shelf os that there is an Eero 6 satellite in the window nearby. This was at first placed against the back wall of the room together with other base stations, but was moved to the window, see picture below, to give best possible coverage by the front door, where the doorbell from Netatmo is located. That made it logical to connect the Aqara hub to it.

There is also an Apple TV 4 (now rebranded to Apple TV HD) here, but this is just used to watch TV in this room and is well hidden behind the TV (which is not smart in any way). Just after installation, it was part of the Apple Home system in the house, which was possible to do. It took some time, however, before I realized that this generation cannot function as a fully fledged Apple Home server, which caused some programs not to work anymore, so it is now taken out of the Apple Home setup.

After the living room remote was upgraded (because Logitech sadly has decided to stop making universal remote controls and we got a new one in the hope that it will last a long time), the old one, a Harmony Ultimate with a corresponding Harmony Hub, was moved down here. It serves no other purpose in the smart home than controlling the TV set and the Apple TV.