Home & family safety
Peace of mind, wherever you are
Most of what goes wrong at home while you are out is not dramatic. It is a window left open in the rain, a door that did not latch, the heating failing on the coldest weekend of the year – small things that are cheap to fix early and expensive to find late.
Spåna is aimed at exactly those. It runs on the sensors already paired to your DIRIGERA hub, and turns them into alerts on your phone rather than into a history you would have to remember to check. The common thread is timing: nearly all of these problems are trivial if you find out in the first hour and a genuine headache if you find out on Sunday night.
Arrival alerts are the ones people set up first. A motion sensor covering the entrance or driveway, wired to a "someone arrives" alert, tells you when a delivery turns up, when the kids get home from school, and when someone is at the door while the house should be empty. It is the same signal in all three cases – what changes is the context you read it in.
The open-door and open-window alerts are the quiet workhorses. A door-left-open rule with a ten-minute duration ignores normal comings and goings entirely and only speaks up when something genuinely has been left open. That is the difference between an alert you act on and one you learn to swipe away, and it is worth tuning the duration until you hit it.
Temperature thresholds cover the seasonal failures. A low threshold on an empty house in winter catches heating failure while it is still just heating failure, before it becomes plumbing. A high threshold is useful in a loft, a conservatory or anywhere with equipment that should not cook. Both fire on crossing the value you set, so you get one alert on the way through rather than a stream while it hovers.
What holds all of this together is that none of it involves a camera or a subscription to a service watching your house for you. The agent runs on your own hardware, talks to your hub locally, and keeps a single outbound connection open so there are no ports to forward. The sensors were already there. Spåna is the part that notices.
Alerts worth setting up
Each of these is a rule you configure once in Spåna against a room. Tune the durations and thresholds until the alerts you get are ones you act on.
- Someone arrives
- Motion first detected at the entrance, hallway or driveway. Deliveries, family getting home, or someone at the door when the house should be empty – all the same signal, read in context.
- Door or window left open
- Set a duration long enough to ignore normal use – ten minutes is a good starting point. Only genuine "we left it open" cases get through, which is what keeps the alert worth reading.
- Temperature drops below
- A winter floor on an empty house. Crossing it means the heating has stopped doing its job, with enough warning to act before pipes are involved.
- Temperature rises above
- A ceiling for lofts, conservatories, or any room with equipment in it. Fires once on the way up through the value you set.
What this setup needs
Spåna watches sensors that are already paired to your DIRIGERA hub, so most of this is placement rather than shopping.
- A motion sensor covering the entrance, hallway or driveway – wherever arrivals happen first.
- Open/close sensors on the front and back doors, and on the windows you are most likely to leave open.
- A temperature sensor in the coldest room for winter cover, or the warmest one if overheating is your concern.
- A DIRIGERA hub with all of it paired in the IKEA Home smart app, and an always-on device – Pi, NAS or mini PC – running the Spåna agent.
Questions
- Will Spåna alert me to a door left open at home?
- Any sensor paired to your DIRIGERA hub can become an alert, including door/window, motion and temperature sensors, so you catch problems early wherever you are.
- Can I get an alert when someone arrives at my front door?
- Yes. Put a motion sensor on the entrance or driveway and set a "someone arrives" alert. It fires the first time motion is detected, so deliveries and family getting home both register.
- Can Spåna tell me who is at the door?
- No. There is no camera involved, so Spåna knows that something moved, not who it was. For most people that is the trade they want – you get the timing without a camera pointed at your entrance.
- Does this replace a home alarm system?
- No. Spåna sends alerts to your phone but has no siren, no monitoring centre and no emergency dispatch. Treat it as awareness rather than as security.
Built on the sensors you already have
Every alert on this page runs on standard IKEA DIRIGERA sensors – motion, door/window and temperature. Group them into rooms, set your own alerts, and Spåna does the watching.