Not a review of IKEA products. This is more of me asking questions in the hope of getting responses from people.
I’ve just watched a video announcing a new range of IoT products from IKEA coming out in January 2026 i.e. next month. There are something like 20 products or so, including sensors, smart lights, and more. Of particular interest to me are the battery-powered sensors. I noticed a headline figure that the new products would be compatible with both ZigBee and Matter, which it turns out is not really true.
Having just spent some time making my first ever ZigBee gadget from some Arduino code for the new ESP8266-C6 which is both WiFi and ZigBee compatible – I’ve suddenly developed an interest in the subject, an interest quick quickly died when I took a step back and realised that of course the cost of making your own Zigbee gadget isn’t really any cheaper than buying the finished product from AliExpress which also comes in a box – but I digress…
At first, I got very excited thinking that IKEA were truly going to bring out products that would handle both comms protocols at once. But in fact, they are Matter products and will use the Ikea gateway as a link between Matter and Zigbee. So, nothing too exciting there.
But what’s got me wound up is their claim that their sensor products, which may in the past have used CR2032/CR2450/AA/AAA batteries – will not only work on the alkaline versions but also on their own range of rechargeable batteries (and hence generic rechargeables), which, as you may know, have a lower voltage than the alkaline equivalents. I’ve just given away some of my AAA rechargeable batteries because they’ve been sitting in a storage box doing nothing for (in some cases) years due to the well-established fact that most current smart sensors which work on AAA batteries for example, start to show low battery indicators as we get down towards the 1.1V-1.2V region which means that rechargeables are definitely out of the picture. What IKEA appears to be claiming is that their new products will handle both types of batteries and therefore must have a lower voltage point at which the batteries is considered to be exhausted.
If indeed this is reality and not hype, it’s a definite game changer. I can’t tell you how many CR2032s, CR2450, AAA and AA batteries I go through with various sensors, emergency lights, etc. every year. If I could PRACTICALLY do away with these and use products that run on rechargeable equivalents while still getting a decent length of operation on a charge and without paying a big premium, I would have to be starting to rethink what products I want to use in the future.
My guts tell me that environmentally I’m not doing the world any good by using countless throw away batteries every year, but due to the absence of practical alternatives, I’ve just gone along with this up to now.
This needs keeping in perspective however as rechargeables are generally of very much lower capacity than non-rechargeable equivalents as well as having the lower voltage problem. I remember my neighbour introducing me to an orange flashing LED and a black plastic container to handle CR2032 rechargeable batteries. The idea was to make a flashing candle ornament for the living room which could be recharged using the rechargeable CR2032 batteries. All of this was great until I realised that the capacity of the rechargeable CR2032 was something like a tenth of the capacity of the non-rechargeable equivalent, so that idea went in the bin. I ended up using the same container but a standard CR2032 for glass-encased orange flashing-LED ornaments (we use 2 of them on an almost daily basis).
The Ikea announcement – time for change or flash in the pan?