Ikea Skydrag Cabinet Strip lights (review)


I don’t have many Ikea products in my smart home – just a Myrvarv strip, a few Mittled spotlights (both via Trådfri drivers), and the gateway, of course – but I’m always keen to try out other stuff whenever it’s available. Thankfully (in some ways) Ikea in Taiwan has a rather limited range of products for me to splurge on, but I did fancy trying the Skydrag strip lighting, due to me needing to fix a long-running issue with the current wardrobe lighting. I figured that even though the product is pretty bare-bones, it still might interest some of our readers, so if you’re looking for strip lighting with a built-in diffuser, read on.To get more news about neon light strip, you can visit htj-led.com official website.

Ikea’s stuff comes in the most basic of packaging, but we’re so used to this minimalist approach now, that it’s not something we tend to think about. As long as the goods are protected and survive the journey, that’s ok. The price justifies the lack of colour print in the case of Ikea.

What you do get on the package are the basics. The strip is only capable of warm white set to 2700K, but it is capable of dimming and gives me 530lm in total for 7.7 watts of power. As the product will need a driver to work, this is shown as excluded on the box, so you know you need a Trådfri driver for smart home use and the required power cable for the driver. You’ll also need the gateway, although as it can actually work without smart functionality, this isn’t explicitly mentioned on the box as a requirement.

Skydrag comes with a built-in proximity/motion sensor that can be turned off, which is just as well, as I couldn’t get it to perform adequately! When it’s set to ‘auto’, it should turn the light strip on, whilst ‘on’ is actually the sensor turned off, which seems a bit counterintuitive. As the sensor didn’t work for me, I’ll not dwell on it anymore, as I already had a different automation solution in mind anyway, which I’ll mention later.

Ikea does a good job of making Skydrag as adaptable as possible by providing three different types of ‘brackets’ (my term) that allow the strip to be mounted in various ways. The Clamp brackets are designed for places where you might not have enough depth to use screws, so there are adhesive strips to go with these two clamp brackets, as I refer to them. You then have ‘extension brackets’ that allow the strips to overhang slightly. The final ‘angle brackets’ can be used to angle the light so that they’re not facing straight down, although this can only be achieved in certain locations. I actually used these in my wardrobe instead of the clamp brackets, as I had enough depth to fit screws.

You get the obligatory manual, which does explain how and where to use the different types of brackets, and you also get a pair of tracking strips to house the wire coming from Skydrag in order to keep everything tidy.

Finally, you get some double-sided adhesive strips to mount the clamp brackets and the cable tracking, as well as two pairs of screws and a Torx screw bit, which you should keep hold of, as the screws use this particular type of drill bit.

As previously mentioned, Skydrag requires a Trådfri driver if you specifically want smart control of your strip. Luckily, I already had one installed and set up, and because the driver is actually the smart device, not the light as such, there was no need for me to do much other than changing the location and the name/description of the lights to better represent what they’re being used for. No new installation was needed.

The Ikea app is ok, just not great, but you’re going to need it in order to set things up. Here are a few screenshots just so you get a feel for the app, and how it works in terms of its structure. As you can see, I currently have lighting in three rooms – some Mittled spotlights in the Kitchen, the Myrvarv light strip in the Wash Room, and the Skydrag in the Bedroom wardrobe.