Here’s another one of those tutorials that I really shouldn’t need to write but somehow do, because despite dozens of tutorials already existing online, it was only a combination of things that got everything working for me. In short, I already have a Philips Hue lighting set-up and I wanted to add some IKEA Tradfri bulbs to it.

I was in my local IKEA when I noticed that they had Tradfri E14 bulbs. Tradfri is IKEA’s smart lightbulb range, introduced a couple of years ago, and it has become a cheaper option for automating your lights.

The main source of light in the rear of my living room takes 5 E14 bulbs, and although the front half is already nicely Hue controlled, it was always just too expensive to do the rear. A twin pack of white bulbs costs £40 on Amazon at time of writing, or £25 for a single bulb. So I’d be looking at over £100 to make one lighting fixture Hue-controlled! (OK – other options include replacing the light switch, fitting a new light to my ceiling that takes fewer, cheaper bulbs, or just continuing to use the light switch like a normal person).

The key thing here was that the IKEA bulbs are £7 each. £35 (5 x £7) is still a lot, but it’s much more palatable than £105. Sidenote: I suspect that there is some kind of economic theory that explains why I’m happy to pay £35 to automate a light, having previously worked out £105 as being the ‘regular’ price.

Now, over the last year or so, IKEA’s Tradfri range has become more compatible with Philips Hue. Both use Zigbee to connect together, but IKEA’s bulbs are designed for it’s own set-up out of the box, and I didn’t want to invest in that. In any case, I think with one or two hiccups along the way, Hue’s app and connectivity is excellent.

So in theory, it should have been simple. Read a couple of guides online. Watch a YouTube video and away you go.

Well it wasn’t quite that simple.

One of the key things I read was that when connecting a Tradfri bulb to an exiting Hue set-up, you should first power down all your existing Hue lights. For precaution, I also unplugged a couple of Meross power adaptors that I use (these tend to appear relatively inexpensively on Amazon, and are useful for controlling things like desk lights and fans).

Then you need to do a reset of the IKEA lights by flicking them off and then on six times. This should result in the bulb flickering slightly to show you that it’s ready. Despite multiple attempts, I couldn’t discern any flickering. I felt that I was more likely to blow a fuse than get the bulbs into reset mode.

Nonetheless, I pressed on.

Then you need to make sure that the lit bulb and the Hue hub are within 30 cm proximity of each other. On YouTube people tend to use a lamp to temporarily set up their new bulbs. They dutifully place their lamp with Tradfri bulb close to where their Hue hub sits. But I don’t own a lamp with the right E14 screw fitting. So I had to fit a long network cable to my hub which fortunately is not too far from the router or the light in question. The hub’s power cable just about stretched too. This is all worth knowing in case you’re using an exotic bulb type and can’t place the hub near the light fitting in question.

Unfortunately, I repeatedly failed to get the bulb to connect using the Android app. Simply searching for a new bulb should have found it. This was frustrating.

The Solution

I ended up using using an app called Hue Lights. It’s iOS, PC and Mac only, and is not made by Philips. So I used the iOS version on my iPad. And I carried out the process one bulb at a time.

Then flicking the light switch off and on 6 times, holding my Hue bridge to the bulb and using the Touchlink function in Settings on the Hue Lights app, I pressed “Force bulb to join bridge.”

Almost immediately the bulb visibly pulsed, and after an arm-aching minute or so (Remember, I was holding my hub to the ceiling), it was properly set-up. I repeated this 4 more times, one bulb at a time, removing bulbs I’d just added to avoid any bulb “confusion.”

Then I replaced all the bulbs, switched everything back on, and the bulbs now showed up in the Hue app on my Android phone. I could allocate them to a new “Room” and control them properly that way with the Hue app.

But for some reason, none of them were yet being recognised by either Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant. At first I thought it might take a few minutes for them to register, but time passed by and none of it was controllable via a smart speaker.

In the end, it required me to disable and then re-enable access to my Hue account from within both the Amazon Alexa app and the Google Home app. 

Once that had been done, all the new bulbs showed up, and I was able to set them up into various groupings and rooms as makes sense within each of the apps. It’s worth spending some time thinking about which combinations of lights you want turned on simultaneously. I think that the Alexa app is better for this than the Google app, but you can fight through and eventually get things sorted in Google’s app too. 

What all of this has told me is that adding off-brand bulbs is not for the fainthearted. But then, I don’t think setting up smart homes is especially easy in any case. And as I noted with my recent piece about setting up radio alarm clocks, I don’t think that the apps are as user friendly as they could be just yet.

Still, if you want to save some money, then IKEA’s bulbs are a decent enough way to go, and aside from automating my living room lights completely, I’m now able to dim some lights that previously weren’t dimmable which is a nice bonus.