Tearing down the new Ikea Grillplats smart plug (US Variant)
Tuesday, March 17, 2026 at 06:15:22
Recently, I tore down an Ikea Inspelning smart plug in order to see if it was able to be modified to be always on. It was, and you can find that teardown and analysis here.
Well, for some reason, Ikea decided to abandon the tested and working ZigBee protocol plugs and go to a Matter-based mess. Why? I have no idea save that it could potentially allow them to put devices on WiFi later - or perhaps they just jumped on the latest Thing like many companies do without any soul-searching as to if this is a good idea.
Regardless, the new Grillplats (Grilling Place, or some area where you have an outdoor grill for cooking) has arrived and is for sale at stores. If this is like any other Ikea devices of this nature, they will sell out immediately.
What’s in the Grillplats box
(All of my experiences are coming from using Home Assistant. YMMV here.)
The plug comes in the standard white box with a yellow top listing the name. Inside, you get both a plug and one of the new Matter-enabled Billresa (road trip) buttons. The button features two separate buttons that can be detected as single push, double push, or long push. Sometimes. Home Assistant doesn’t seem to be able to reliably keep one of these active without pinging it at times, or doing a song and dance to make it work again. That’s not the point of this article, however.
The new device is not as wide as the older Inspelning, and has a white face instead of the gray face. This one tears apart much like it’s older brother - there are six clips around the outside of the device. Two on top, two on bottom, and one on either side. You’ll need something like an iOpener to pry the unit open and pop the clips. Note that because the top panel isn’t as wide, it’s less flexible and doesn’t want to pop as well as the older one. Be gentle here, I mangled a side clip when tearing apart.
The board itself looks like a more compact and kind of janky version of the previous model. It’s very similar, save that components are packed tighter. Two screws hold the board into the case:
To remove the board, remove these two screws then gently press the assembly down on a hard surface. The board should slide up, then you and remove it by gently pulling on something. I usually use the combination of the “L” socket and the relay as a gripping point. The board assembly just lifts out at this point, and the safety ground plug will come out as it’s not attached to anything.
Most things in here seem to be similar to the previous gen. Power supply is a bit more compact, but they’ve put the dropping resistor in the corner away from the capacitors. Any heat generated, assuming your outlets have the ground on the bottom, will rise up away from the capactors. They’ll still dry out and fail, of course, seeing as they’re the cheapest you can get. Other than that, you have the power monitoring board, a new Matter transceiver, and a cheap as chips relay. I didn’t try it, but I suspect you could lift the Matter board and put it in one of the older devices.
The back is similar to the older unit as well, with two big pads where the AC rides in the unit. This one can be easily modified to make an always on device as well.
As before, if you are tearing these down and working with them, you need to remember that there are potentially lethal voltages in here. This can kill you and cause property damage. This information is provided simply so you know what’s inside of the device without tearing it apart, anything else is on you. If you don’t know what you’re doing - don’t do it!
Putting it back together is, of course, the opposite of disassembly. Push the board back in, replace the screws, replace the ground plug, and pop the top back on.
The unit itself reports a lot more than the last one:
Conclusions regarding the Ikea Grillplats plug
This seems to be a worthy counterpart to the previous unit, even if Matter seems to be a bit more janky when dealing with Home Assistant. It can be modified to provide always-on current monitoring. Will it last? Time will tell.