With GRILLPLATS, Swedish furniture group IKEA is expanding its smart-home range with a new smart plug. The compact device turns conventional electrical appliances into smart components of a connected home.

Smart plugs are among the easiest ways to turn an existing home into a smart home. They are inserted between the wall socket and the appliance and then allow control via an app, voice assistant or automated scenes.

With GRILLPLATS, IKEA focuses above all on ease of use, energy monitoring and broad compatibility through Matter over Thread.

What is IKEA GRILLPLATS?

GRILLPLATS is a compact smart plug that is inserted between a wall socket and an electrical appliance. This allows any connected device to be controlled digitally.

Using a smart-home app or automations, devices can, for example, be:

• switched on and off via smartphone
• controlled automatically according to a schedule
• integrated into smart-home scenes

This allows lamps, coffee machines or fans, for example, to be activated automatically or completely disconnected from the power supply.

Matter support

An important feature of GRILLPLATS is its support for the open Matter standard.

Matter was developed to make it easier for devices from different manufacturers to work together. Devices that use this standard can be integrated into many smart-home ecosystems and used across platforms. IKEA is also increasingly relying on Matter for the latest generation of its smart-home devices to provide better compatibility and easier setup.

These include Apple Home, Google Home, Amazon Alexa, Samsung SmartThings and Home Assistant.

The device uses the Matter over Thread wireless standard. A Thread Border Router is therefore required for control via a smartphone, such as the:

• Aqara Smart Hub M200*
• Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2*
• Amazon Echo Show 8 or 11*
• Home Assistant Yellow*
• Google Nest Hub 2nd Gen*
• Apple HomePod mini*

Measuring the energy consumption of individual devices

A particularly useful feature of the new plug is its integrated energy consumption measurement.

GRILLPLATS can record the power consumption of connected devices and display the corresponding values. This gives users a better overview of how much energy individual devices actually consume.

The integrated energy measurement also enables interesting automations. Reddit user mocelet demonstrates very clearly in a post how this can work in practice.

Especially as energy prices rise, transparent analysis of power consumption is becoming increasingly important.

Price and availability

IKEA often pursues a low-entry-price strategy for its smart-home products. GRILLPLATS is expected to cost €8.99, making it significantly cheaper than the recently introduced Shelly Plug M Gen3 smart plug.

GRILLPLATS is currently only available in local IKEA stores. The smart plug is not currently available online.

Source/Photo: (Amazon / IKEA)