Smart Home 2026: First Steps With the IKEA KLIPPBOK Water Leak Sensor ⭐

Back in November, IKEA announced an extensive line of affordable, Matter-compatible smart home devices. Scanning through the list of devices, I knew I would buy several of them, and I started thinking about where they might make sense, given that we have an apartment in Mexico City and a condo in Pennsylvania and split our time between the two.

But this was a waiting game. At that time, IKEA said that availability would vary by region--we have IKEA locations near-ish us in both places--and that the first devices would appear by the end of last year. Whether that ever happened is debatable, but I never saw it. The company attended CES in January and showed off the new devices there. But I had to keep waiting.

We came back to PA from Mexico about a week after the original announcement, and we spent the next two months being busy because of the holidays and whatever surrounding drama. We returned to Mexico in early January and then I kept checking on IKEA Mexico to see whether any of the new devices had arrived. But they never did. By the time we came back to PA in mid-May, I had started checking the IKEA U.S. website for availability. It had to happen eventually.

And then it did. While we were up in the Finger Lakes over Memorial Day weekend, I was discussing this with my brother-in-law, and how the device I was most interested in was the water leak detector: A water leak is among the big potential issues that can happen when you're away from a home for months at a time, maybe one of the worst issues. And so I checked yet again, this time from my phone. And ... there they were. They're available now.

Some quick math ensued. How many water leak sensors would we need?

In PA, we have two bathrooms, both with a toilet and one with two sinks. We have a kitchen sink, of course, but also a refrigerator with a water line for making ice and a dishwasher. We have a laundry room with the main water connection, a clothes washer (that we had previously bought a water collection pan for just in case), and, because this is PA, a water softener through which most of the water going into the home passes. That's almost a dozen places that need a water leak sensor.

In Mexico City, there are also two bathrooms, each with a sink and a toilet. A kitchen sink. A refrigerator that doesn't have a water line but did freeze over once, triggering a small water leak on the floor. And a laundry room with the main water connection, a clothes washer, a sink, and a water heater. That's 10 right there, too.

In the good news department, the IKEA KLIPPBOK water leak detector is just $7.99 per unit. (You gotta love IKEA brand names.) So I started with nine of them, mostly because I miscounted on the first pass, and they arrived the day after we got back from the Finger Lakes. Total cost was a bit under $72, though that doesn't include the two AAA batteries that each device requires. Yet another thing to keep track of.

My initial reaction to the box...