IKEA GRILLPLATS smart plug with energy tracking and Matter

First Look

The IKEA GRILLPLATS is a smart plug that turns any standard lamp or small appliance into a connected device. Priced at roughly EUR 8, it is one of the most affordable Matter-certified smart plugs on the market. Commissioning is a single Matter QR-code scan through whatever border router you already run, and there's no vendor account to create first.

GRILLPLATS does more than toggle power on and off. It monitors energy consumption in real time, letting you see exactly how much electricity any plugged-in appliance draws. Plug in an old floor lamp, a fan, or a coffee maker, and you can track standby draw, peak usage, and cumulative consumption in the IKEA Home Smart app. This data often reveals quiet energy wasters that run unnoticed for months.

I came at that problem from the opposite end, and I'd suggest you consider it. My metering lives in the consumer unit, not on the sockets: a Tuya TONGOU DIN-rail breaker rated 50 A with metering built in, so a whole group of circuits is measured at the point where the electricity enters rather than at each appliance. There's a metering Zigbee plug downstream for the odd device I want isolated, but the breaker does the heavy lifting. The mistake worth learning from is the second breaker. It's a 63 A unit and I deliberately specified it without metering to save money, on the reasoning that I already had one measured feed. That reasoning was wrong, and the cost of being wrong is a circuit I now have no visibility into short of pulling the breaker and swapping it in a live panel. Panel-level metering is cheap while the cabinet is open and expensive afterwards. Socket-level plugs like GRILLPLATS are the reverse: trivial to add whenever you want, but they only ever see what's in front of them.

The plug uses Matter over Thread for smart home connectivity. Thread is a low-power, self-healing mesh protocol that provides fast, local communication without cloud routing. Matter ensures the plug works across Apple HomeKit, Google Home, Amazon Alexa, Samsung SmartThings, and Homey without proprietary bridges. IKEA's new product line built entirely on Matter makes GRILLPLATS a future-proof purchase even as the smart home ecosystem continues to expand.

One standout feature is the direct pairing capability. GRILLPLATS can control up to ten plugs simultaneously from a single IKEA remote control or motion sensor, without any hub involved. This makes it easy to set up simple lighting groups in areas where you do not want to run a hub or install a bridge.

Hardware at a Glance

GRILLPLATS measures 60 x 60 x 90 mm and weighs about 120 g. The body is polycarbonate plastic with a rounded square profile. The plug is compact enough not to block adjacent sockets in most dual-outlet installations.

Power handling specifications follow the certified Matter profile for smart plugs. The energy monitoring feature reports both real-time power in watts and accumulated usage in kilowatt-hours. The display in the IKEA Home Smart app shows a usage history graph over the past 24 hours, 7 days, and 30 days.

Thread radio operates at 2.4 GHz using the IEEE 802.15.4 standard with AES-CCM encryption. As a mains-powered device, GRILLPLATS actively contributes to the Thread mesh network by acting as a router node. This strengthens signal coverage for battery-powered Thread sensors and switches nearby, improving overall network reliability.

The plug includes all hardware needed for installation. No additional cables, adapters, or tools are required.

Ecosystem and Compatibility

GRILLPLATS connects to any Thread Border Router that supports Matter commissioning. IKEA DIRIGERA is the recommended option, but Apple HomePod mini, Apple TV 4K (3rd gen), Google Nest Hub 2nd gen, and Amazon Echo 4th gen all function as Thread Border Routers.

That list needs a caveat from me, because two of the four entries are Apple boxes. I own Apple hardware and I have never set up Apple Home, not once. It wasn't a protest, just a fork in the road I didn't take: my border-router duties and my automation logic sit on the same machine in the electrical cabinet, and adding a second home graph that only some of the household could see solved nothing I had a problem with. So the HomeKit column on this page is specification reading rather than lived experience, and you should discount it accordingly. What the platforms expose does differ. Energy monitoring in particular tends to appear in some apps and quietly vanish in others, so check that your chosen ecosystem surfaces the power data before you buy a plug specifically for it.

Home Assistant users can add GRILLPLATS through the Matter integration after commissioning via a Thread Border Router. The plug shows as a switch entity with an optional power sensor entity. Once those entities exist, time-of-day schedules and occupancy triggers are ordinary Home Assistant automations with nothing plug-specific about them.

Scheduling and automation

GRILLPLATS supports timed schedules natively in the IKEA Home Smart app. You can set the plug to turn on at sunrise, off at bedtime, or on a custom daily schedule. In Google Home and Apple Home, GRILLPLATS participates in scenes and automations. Voice commands through Alexa and Google Assistant work for on/off control once the plug is added through its hub.

How People Use It

GRILLPLATS suits any location where you want remote control of an existing lamp or appliance without replacing the device itself.

• Put a living room floor lamp on an evening schedule that turns it on at sunset automatically
• Monitor the power draw of an old chest freezer or window air conditioner to assess energy costs
• Trigger a group of patio lights to switch on when a motion sensor detects movement at the front door
• Use IKEA remote controls to turn off all ten guest room lamps with a single button at checkout in a short-term rental
• Connect a desk fan to run automatically when an air quality sensor detects high CO2

Getting It Running

Setup is straightforward. Insert GRILLPLATS into a mains socket. Open your Thread-capable hub app and start a new device pairing session. Scan the QR code on the side of the plug, or enter the numeric commissioning code. The hub discovers the device in about 60 seconds. Assign it to a room, name the plug after the appliance it controls, and verify that on/off commands respond correctly.

For standalone use without a hub, press and hold the button on the plug while nearby IKEA remote controls or motion sensors are in pairing mode. The direct-pair connection allows immediate control without any app or network required.

If you plan to use energy monitoring, connect the plug to DIRIGERA and open the energy section in the IKEA Home Smart app. Monitoring activates automatically once the plug is commissioned to a hub that supports energy data.

Tips for best results

Give each GRILLPLATS plug a meaningful name in the app that reflects the appliance it controls. This makes voice commands more intuitive. If you run multiple plugs in the same space, group them in the app as a room so a single command can control all of them together.

For energy monitoring accuracy, plug in only one device at a time per plug. Multi-tap adapters combine the draw of several devices, which makes it harder to identify which appliance is responsible for consumption changes.

The Sensor Half of the Equation

A smart plug is the muscle; it needs something to tell it when to flex. On its own GRILLPLATS is a scheduler, but wire it to a couple of cheap IKEA sensors and it becomes genuinely automatic. Because everything here speaks Matter over Thread, the plug and the sensors share one mesh and one dashboard, so the automations are trivial to build:

• Trigger a lamp or fan on GRILLPLATS from the IKEA MYGGSPRAY motion sensor so a room only lights up when someone walks in.
• Let the IKEA ALPSTUGA air quality sensor switch on an air purifier plugged into GRILLPLATS when PM2.5 climbs.

That plug-plus-sensor pairing is the whole point of a cheap Matter starter set: the plug does the acting, the sensors do the sensing, and IKEA prices both low enough that a working automation costs less than a single mid-range smart plug from a name brand.

The Verdict

GRILLPLATS is a practical, affordable entry into Matter-based smart plug control with a useful bonus in the form of energy monitoring. At around EUR 8, it costs less than most smart plugs that lack Matter support entirely. The Thread mesh contribution is an added benefit for households building out a Thread network, since every mains-powered Thread device strengthens the mesh for battery-powered sensors and remotes.

The main dependency is a Thread Border Router. Buyers who do not yet have a DIRIGERA hub, HomePod mini, or similar border router will need to budget for one. For existing Thread users, GRILLPLATS is a natural and cost-effective addition.

Being straight with you about the basis for all this: I don't own a GRILLPLATS, and there is no IKEA smart home hardware in my house at all. No DIRIGERA either, which is the hub half of this product's story. Everything above about the plug itself comes from IKEA's published specification and the Matter smart plug profile it certifies against, not from a unit in a socket. What I brought to the page is the part I have paid for twice: where measurement belongs in a house, and what it costs to put it in the wrong place. For basic automation, scheduling, and per-appliance energy tracking, a EUR 8 Matter plug is hard to argue with. Just don't let a handful of them convince you the panel is covered.