Hovedsoverom/Master Bedroom

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 start of the upgrade process for this bedroom came with the launch of the IKEA Trådfri driver, which is Apple Home compatible and can turn on/off as well as dim connected light sources. One of the light sources compatible with the driver is the Norrfly wardrobe light, see picture below. These come in different lengths and have a built-in motion sensor. We have installed three of these, one behind each of three wardrobe sliding doors, and they work exactly as expected. I should mention that I at first tried to «get away» with installing two longer lights, but the motion sensor failed to trigger for all three doors. There is no programming to be done, the light control takes care of it self, but I should also mention that we had a little startup problem. At the same time as we got these wardrobe lights, we also purchased lamps for the living room compatible with the Trådfri driver, and when I programmed these, I inadvertently left them out of the “Good Night” scene. So when my better half retired for the evening after I had already gone to bed, she would resort to asking Siri to turn off all lights. This also turned the Trådfri driver controlling the wardrobe lights off, and the next time we opened a wardrobe door, the light didn’t come on. It took some head scratching before I figured that out, but it illustrates an aspect of the driver; it appears in Apple Home as a light source that can be turned on/off or dimmed, but if used merely as a power transformer for the type of light like the Norrfly, it should basically be left on constantly and never adjusted. That means that commands to perform some action on all lights also will be performed on such drivers.

The next step was the ceiling light. In many other rooms of the house, the main light is connected to a motion sensor since it is extremely practical having the light turn on automatically when entering, especially if carrying something that makes it hard to reach the manual switch. In the master bedroom, however, the ceiling light is integrated in the ceiling fan, a relatively old model, where a wall switch turns on/off the whole fan, i.e., both fan and light. The fan has two chains that pulled to respectively turn on/off the light and adjust the speed of the fan, from off and through to three speeds, see picture below.

The goal had long been to reach a solution where the fan light could be controlled using a motion sensor and the fan speed based on the temperature in the room, and I struggled for some time to figure this out, with the fan control being the main problem. I looked at products like Bond, which neither works in Europe nor is Apple Home compatible, Insteon Fan Controller, which does not work for 220 V and where a launched Apple Home base station has been phased out, and finally Sonoff iFan04, which actually comes in a 220 V version, but which is not Apple Home compatible (but there is a Homebridge plugin for it). There are Apple Home-compatible ceiling fans, but sadly only for the North-American market. In the end, I resorted to this solution: The existing light bulb in the ceiling fan was exchanged for an IKEA Trådfri E14 smart bulb. This is controlled using a Philips Hue motion sensor, see picture below.

This was for a long programmed so that the light turned on when motion was detected and the time was outside the time of night where we can be expected to be in bed, to avoid having the light turn on when turning in bed during sleep. This type of programming can be done in the Home app, by defining a trigger (motion) and time interval, see screenshot below.

The disadvantage of this setup was that the time interval where the light should not be turned had to be set with a wide margin, to take into account evenings where someone went early to bed og mornings where someone slept long. This meant that in many cases, we had to use a Philips Hue dimmer switch, installed above the old wall switch, if we wanted to turn on/off the light manually at times where it didn’t turn on automatically (in addition, the remaining two buttons have been programmed to turn the fan on/off manually).

This solution worked fairly well, but eventually we started using a so-called “dummy switch” in Homebridge (through this plugin). This is now the solution here, where a virtual switch is turned off at night when we go to bed and on again in the morning, in addition to being turned on/off at defined times. When motion is detected, the virtual switch is used as criterion for whether to turn on/off the ceiling light.

The lamp by the bed had for a long time only traditional bulbs, but in the end also these were replaced by smart bulbs, two IKEA Trådfri E14 smart bulb, partly because it was one of a very few light sources in the house still not «on line» and partly because the switch on the lamp cord is a little hard to find. Now this lamp is controlled by two IKEA Trådfri wireless switches (as far as I can tell sold only in kits with a smart plug), placed on the night stands on either side of the bed, see pictures below. These switches work as other control devices from Trådfri, by only being possible to program in the IKEA app by placing them in the same room as lights to be controlled by it, see screenshot below. Fortunately, in March 2019, it became possible to put two control devices in the same room, so that both switches control both bulbs.

This is another room where we have replaced the old wall switch by a smart version from Aqara, see picture below. The old switch had been installed in a wall box, but the Aqara switch won’t fit into our standard, round wall boxes so I had to make the box a little bit bigger to make it fit. This now works excellently, the wall switch is basically always on, so that the motion sensor control of the smart bulb works as it should. But now, if someone inadvertently turns off the ceiling light using the wall switch, we can easily turn it on again without having to use the physical switch.

In addition, we have installed an Aqara Opple Wireless Scene Switcher, which is a wireless switch with four buttons, where each button can be assigned different functions for short, long, and double press. This makes it far more versatile than the Philips Hue dimmer switch we had here for a long time, where each button could only be programmed with one action (this has now been reprogrammed and is used in guest room 1). This allows us to control all the lights in the room as well as the blinds from this switch by the door, and a bonus is that is aesthetically matches the wall switch below it much better (even if such complex programming requires labels to remember what each button does…).

To control the fan, in the end I ended up with a product I had already installed a couple of other places (there to control lights), namely a a Fibaro Single Switch. However, I was partly concerned that the load incurred when the fan starts would be too much for the relay and also partly unsure whether it would be possible to get access to a separate wire to the engine fan. Both turned out to be unfounded. The latter solved itself by unmounting the fan from the ceiling and confirming that there were easily accessible wires for light and fan separately, as well as plenty of space in the connection box for the Fibaro relay. This worked well for a long time, but partly the Fibaro relay started to show some instability (Fibaro blamed this on changes in the Apple Home architecture) and partly it was somewhat annoying that this solution only allowed turning on/off the fan, not adjusting the speed. A Sonoff iFan04 fan controller was therefore installed instead, see picture below. This makes it possible to also adjust the fan speed, both in Apple Home and with a dedicated remote control put on one of the nightstands, see further down.

And since the Philips Hue motion sensor also measures temperature (and light brightness), I use its measurements to control the fan. This has been programmed in the Eve app, since it allows routines using both triggers and conditions. It is now set up so that when the temperature exceeds 20 degrees Celsius, the fan is turned on, and correspondingly off again when the temperature drops below 20, see screenshots below.

After the spring of the manual blinds suddenly broke, I saw no reason to replace it with another manual one. Instead, yet another set of IKEA Fyrtur blinds was installed, see picture below. As elsewhere in the house, this work flawlessly, with the little remote control placed on one of the night stands.

As the seasons changed, we realized that we only used a few “settings” in terms of how closed the blinds were. When an Aqara Oppe smart wireless switch was taken out of service in a different room, it was programmed with these “closed settings” for each of the four buttons (as well as a couple of other light scenes), and the switch placed on the other night stand, see picture below. This makes it much easier to achieve the desired position of the blinds.

After we got a dog, with rather thin coat, who likes going to bed in the master bedroom early in the evening, we realized that during winter, it would often be on the chilly side, even with the window closed. We therefore installed a Mill panel heater here, see picture below, of a similar type to one we had previously installed in the office (see more about Mill and the functionality of these smart heaters there). Also this has been combined with an Aqara window sensor and programmed so that it turns off when the window is opened and on again when the window is closed again. Otherwise if follows the temperature program defined in the Mill app.

Also in this room, there is a Verisure smoke detector, see picture below, and has been mentioned under other rooms, measurements of temperature and humidity are brought into Apple Home via Homebridge.

Within the category of “personal care and health” we don’t have many smart devices, but one of the few we have is a Beddit sleep tracker. The sensor, in the form of a “pad” is placed between the mattress and the sheet, see picture below. Beddit also requires that the connected phone is in the same room so I have had to put a charger on the nightstand (something I was hoping to avoid; we partly have a combined phone/watch charger in the office and I partly dislike having the phone next to the bed). The tracker works well, though. I was uncertain whether the sensor underneath the sheet would bother me, but this is no issue, and I like the statistics provided (see picture below) and sleep tips given. It can also be integrated with the Apple Health app so that the sleep data are combined with other health data.

A complete overview of the devices in the room is shown in the screenshot below.