My first purchase for home automation years and years ago was Philips Hue Starter Kit with the bridge, couple of light bulbs, a motion sensor and a remote switch. I’ve been using them as the basis for a lot of stuff but for a long time, I’ve wanted to switch away because Philips is going down the enshittification route requiring user accounts in their cloud to run local home smart lights.
An IKEA DIRIGERA hub with two motion sensors landed on my hands last year and in March 2026, I decided to give it a go, switching from Hue to DIRIGERA since the Hue lights connect to IKEA’s hub.
I replaced the motion sensor (that I use for night lights) with VALLHORN motion sensor, swapped the Hue Bridge with DIRIGERA hub, reconnected lights and updated my Home Assistant configuration.
Home Assistant win
One nice thing about Home Assistant is that if you define your automations and scripts with areas and zones instead of individual entities, you can swap things out and everything will continue working.
I did have some trouble getting the IKEA app to find the hub. The old app (for the previous generation of hubs) immediately found the hub and told me to use the new app but that one didn’t find it no matter what. Luckily I had a couple of other mobile devices and was able to find it with one of them so I could connect the lights and then do everything else in Home Assistant.
First impressions
VALLHORN is way worse as a motion sensor than the Philips one. It does especially poorly in dark which makes the night light functionality — the only one I’m using it for — not work at all and that sucks.
Another downside is — and I don’t know if this is due to Hue lights + DIRIGERA hub or a DIRIGERA problem or a DIRIGERA + Home Assistant problem — that adjusting the lights isn’t quite as smooth. For my night lights, I have set the lights in hallway and bedroom to light up to 20% brightness so they don’t burn my eyes when I wake up in the night.
However, the lights always turn on to the previous brightness before they dim down. So I had to make a change where the lights in the night, before they go off, they dim to that 20%. It’s an okay workaround but not optimal.
I haven’t bought a new light switch / remote control for them yet. The Hue Switch cannot be used with DIRIGERA so I need a new one but given the issues with the night sensor, I’m still wondering whether I should switch back to Hue (or add Hue as a second hub). My Homelab setup is currently out of power sockets so I can’t run both of them right now.
I do not want to go back to Philips ecosystem though so I’ll keep looking for better alternatives before caving in and switching back.