Category Archives: Systems

Outbuildings: Week 39, Day 5

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Outbuildings: Week 39, Day 5

Another day of no progress by the main contractor or their subcontractors but my alarm system installer was back for their final bit of set-up – connecting the new alarm system in the Outbuildings via a radio link to the DualCom monitoring board within the House alarm’s control panel, which is what talks to the remote monitoring centre, via both a mobile data connection and an Internet connection. This means that any alarm activation – either for Intruder or Fire – will now be forwarded to the monitoring centre, who will contact the key holders and alert the Fire Service or Police as appropriate.

There’s more activity planned for Monday, with the floor laying team back to finish the vinyl flooring. Building Control are also scheduled to visit on Monday.

The toilet, which was ordered 8 weeks ago, finally got delivered today too – ready to be installed as soon as the vinyl flooring is finished.

Temperature and Humidity Monitoring in the Outbuildings – Stage 2

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An earlier Post outlined the plan to use a GL.iNet GL-S20 Thread Border Router in conjunction with Ikea TIMMERFLOTTE temperature and humidity sensors to monitor the environment in various rooms in the Outbuildings, using Matter-over-Thread technology.

The GL-S20 arrived from China on 30 November, exactly one week after ordering. It’s as good as I was expecting and works perfectly when running from PoE, consuming just 1.34W (as reported by the UniFi PoE network switch).

Setting it up as a ‘Leader’ for a Thread network was pretty straightforward, using its Web interface. Configuring it in Home Assistant was a bit more problematic – it showed up straight away as an “Other” Thread network (since it’s on the same subnet so mDNS “just works”) but it wasn’t obvious how to make it the Preferred Thread network. The answer came from this forum thread which says to use the GL-S20 Tool iOS App which can grab the credentials from the device, then the Home Assistant iOS App can upload those to Home Assistant. It took a few attempts to get the GL-S20 App to find the device on the network and then to copy the credentials, but it worked in the end and now Home Assistant sees the Thread network as “Preferred” – which means it should use it by default.

It also looks like the TIMMERFLOTTE sensors are getting closer to being available to purchase in the UK. They’re now listed on Ikea’s Swedish website, for 79 SEK which is about 7 GBP. That price doesn’t include the necessary AAA batteries but the sensor is specifically designed to use two 750 mAh rechargeable AAA cells and Ikea sell a good range of those.

Update 2025-12-09: The TIMMERFLOTTE sensors are now listed on the IKEA UK website and are showing as in-stock at my local store, for £5 each.