Gjesterom 1/Guest Room 1

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

This room does double duty; as guest room for visitors and as dog room for our dog when she is home alone (notice the home-made dog cage in the picture which combines storage and dog cage into one space-saving piece of furniture…). For lighting, a ceiling lamp does the heavy lifting. It now has an IKEA Trådfri E27 smart bulb, see picture below. The light is controlled by a motion sensor from Aqara, see picture below.

The light control for the ceiling lamp was at first set up with very little complicated rules; when the sensor detected motion, the light went on and then automatically off again after 5 minutes of inactivity.

But if there are guests using the room as bedroom, they obviously do not want this routine to kick in and turn on the light if turning over in the bed. There is of course a traditional light switch here and they could simply turn the light off using this. But I generally strongly mislike people “tampering” with the manual switches since devices go offline that way (it has taken quite some effort to train my wife to keep her fingers off the switches throughout the house that have smart devices connected to them). This have eventually therefore been set up the same way as in our master bedroom, i.e., that during specified intervals the light does not turn on when motion is detected. This has been solved by creating a so-called “dummy switch” in Homebridge, called “MR Condition Light”. This is used as a condition for whether the ceiling light shall be turned on or not at motion, see screenshot below, and this condition light is partly turned on as part of the “Good Morning” scene and off as part of the “Good Night” scene and partly by using an Aqara smart switch mounted by the door, see picture below. This switch also controls the ceiling light, the bedhead lamp, and the smart blinds.

Then there is a lamp by the bed, this had for a long time only a traditional bulb, but in the also this was replaced by a smart bulb, an IKEA Trådfri U10 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 itself is a little hard to find. Now this lamp is controlled by an IKEA Trådfri wireless switch, placed directly under the lamp, see picture below. This switch works 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. Since both the switch and both bulbs are placed in the same room, it turns on/off both lights.

After it was “liberated” from a different room, we have also installed an Aqara Opple Wireless Scene Switcher by the bed, where each of the four buttons can be programmed for short/double/long press, in total twelve options. This is programmed to control the lights in this room, the blinds, outdoor lights, and the scenes Good Morning/Good Night as well as activate/deactivate the camera.

Also here we had the classic challenge that if someone turned off the physical wall switch (which in this case was an xComfort wireless switch, with a relay in the ceiling box above the ceiling lamp), the smart bulb would lose connection and this no longer be remotely controlled. Since the wall switch here was a wireless switch, it wasn’t a feasible solution to replace the switch with a smart version and neither was it an option to install a smart relay behind the switch. This challenge therefore remained unsolved for a while, but I had a smart Fibaro relay left over from the downstairs bathroom, and this put me on to the idea of having this installed above the ceiling lamp instead. An authorized electrician was consulted, who confirmed that this should work, and he turned out to be right–he was able to install this so that both relays fit in the wall box/hollow of the lamp itself. That allows controlling the ceiling light from a phone or other device, even if someone turns off the manual wall switch.

Also in this room we have a LED light panel with a motion sensor, of the type we have several of elsewhere in the house, here installed in a clothes closet, see picture below. It provides a little extra light in the closet and turns on/off automatically.

There is also an IKEA Trådfri range extender here, placed in a power outlet under the bed, where it is quite close to the outdoor lights so that it contributes to a “dense” Zigbee network.

Later, a UniFi Express satellite has also been deployed here, on top of the shades case, see picture below.

We have a camera here for keeping an eye on the dog. Originally, this was a Logitech Circle 2 camera, but after years of having problems with the camera going offline, it finally broke down completely. It was replaced by an Aqara G2H camera, which has been placed on top of the curtain rod, as shown in the picture below.

For a long time, we had old-fashioned manual blinds covering the two windows in this room, but these gradually became annoying in that they were difficult to open. We therefore installed two IKEA Fyrtur smart blinds, see picture below. These can be operated using buttons on the blinds themselves, but as mentioned above, there are also remote controls attached with the blinds, and these have been placed by the bed (as shown in the picture further above). The blinds work perfectly and they are easy to operate, now also from the bed.

Since we rarely use this room, heating has not been a priority, but there is an old-fashioned panel heater (old-fashioned in the sense that it is not online in any way, but it has a built-in thermostat) used only when guests stay here. Recently, though, we had to spend a lot of time in this room when nursing our dog after surgery, when she could not use stairs for some weeks, and when introducing a new kitten into the pack. By coincidence, around this time, I saw an add for a product promising to add smart control to traditional electrical heaters, Mill WiFi Socket (Mill is a Norwegian company that also makes different lines of heaters with built-in WiFi). This product is in reality a smart plug with an integrated thermostat, and it is installed in-between the wall socket and the power plug of the heater, see picture below. This product has been released in several editions, we had first a so-called 2. gen. (the initial setup of this was fiddly, it was hard to get to connect to our network), but it stopped working after a couple of years and we got a new one, then a so-called 3. gen. (which was much easier to set up).

The temperature setting on the oven itself must be set a few degrees above the expected maximum temperature, so the Mill plug can control the temperature by simply turning on and off the power to the heater. Using the associated Millheat app we can define programs, with different temperatures throughout the day, see screenshot below, or override the programs and set a fixed temperature. I won't claim this to be the world's most user-friendly app, but it works well, and we can now adjust the temperature in this room no matter where we are.

Officially, the Mill products don't support integration with any of the smart home platforms. Since this room sees so little use and since I couldn't find any other products with the same functionality, I accepted this when making the purchase of the smart plug.

A bonus was that I found a Mill WiFi app for Athom Homey, and this works very well. The smart plug appears as a device in Homey, see screenshot below, and practically all functionality available in the Mill app can also be found here (except for editing the 24-hour temperature programs, but this is something one rarely adjusts). My joy was no lesser when I next discovered that this exposed the Mill socket to Apple Home  (via the HomeKitty app). Unfortunately, the functionality in the Home app is more limited, see screenshot below (later also a plugin for Homebridge for Mill has been created, but also this with some limitations in which adjustments can be made in the Home app). Also here the current temperature measured by the Mill socket is shown and it can be changed, but instead of the program modes used by Mill, the Home app offers its standard Apple Home modes (heat, cool, auto, and off.

As in the office, where we also have an electric panel heater, we wanted a solution where the heater would turn off if the window was opened for airing. The idea is of course to avoid using unnecessary energy by having the heater trying to compensate for the cooler air from the window, and this has been solved using an Aqara window sensor, see picture below. This has been programmed using two simple routines, where open window turns the smart plug off and closing it puts it back into the automatic program mode.

I later realized that for guests staying in this room, this solution would be cumbersome; they would either have to install the Mill app on their own smartphone and be allowed to log in with our user to control the heater (something we would be hesitant to allow) or ask us the change the temperature. So when a Philips Hue dimmer switch was freed up from the office, the solution was to reprogram this to control the heater, see picture below. I had to do some testing to figure out how this could be done, but in the end the solution was to connect the switch to Homey (via the Hue app for Homey) and program a flow for each button. Since changing the program this way would mean the heater would not revert automatically to the programmed temperature change throughout the 24-hours period, the buttons only set different temperatures.

Originally, we installed an Eero mesh wifi system with three units, one in the basement and two on the first floor. This worked mostly quite well, but in one half of the basement floor the coverage was not great. An extra add-on rougher was therefore purchased and installed here in this guest room, see picture above. This gives better coverage in this end of the floor and the garden outside.

The Home app view of this room, showing both lighting and heating components as well as video feed from the camera, see screenshot below.