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Brew a cuppa - Honey, put the Kettle on!


This is not something I get to talk about very often, but here is a device from a British Company, WeeKett. They are originally from Edinburgh and so Wee means small or little. Not that I think a 1.7L kettle is small.

My favourite drink is Coffee and in a previous post I have written about how I have automated my coffee in the morning. However, sometimes I don't want to have a coffee and my partner seems to prefer to drink Tea (This being real English Breakfast Tea.... definitely NOT made by Liptons).  To do that we have to boil the kettle. In Europe, our Electric Kettle's boil reasonably quickly as we have 220v-240v rather than 110v, so electric kettles are common rather than putting a pot on the hob.

However, sometimes we want herbal teas, and then you don't boil, you heat to 80C/160F, or Japanese green tea when you heat to 70C.

Instead of getting up, walking to the kitchen, filling the. kettle, waiting for it to boil, and then pouring it.... let's initiate the heating from the living room.

Now this isn't really automation as I have not added it into any automation what so ever. It is more around convenience.... and I wanted to play.

WeeKett do two smart Kettles, the one I chose is the "Alexa Smart Kettle with Cool Touch" for two reasons:

  • It has the 70, 80, 90 and 100C options on the kettle - because I believe in always having the traditional manual ways of doing things for your guests and sometimes it is just quicker.
  • It has slightly more capacity.

Adding the Kettle to Apple Home.

You can tell from the name that the Kettle is designed to work with Alexa, and it is a Tuya device. It is not designed to work with Apple Home and Apple Home has yet to implement Kettles as a device category. So, how did I do it?

It was a multi-step process.

Adding the Kettle to Tuya Life

Quite a simple process actually. This actually enables you to use the kettle from your phone.... but it is another app.

The Kettle inside the Tuya app.



Adding the Kettle to Home Assistant.

Home Assistant has a Tuya Plugin and, again, this was quite simple. As I'd already added the Kettle to Tuya Life, it was just there in the Tuya plugin, which is a native part of Home Assistant.


Now, you can see that this device is disabled, and that is because I took the next step which was to make it local.

Tuya requires cloud interfaces and, quite simply, I don't want that as I want my devices to be local. This had been the long term advantage of Apple Home and, now, Matter.

This required the HACS (Home Assistant Community Store) module, Tuya Local, not to be confused with LocalTuya. Both of these enable Tuya devices to be managed locally, but it seems to me that Tuya Local is the better one of the two as it is more active and updated.

When you add a device into Tuya Local it uses any existing info you have in your Tuya Life account to try and make the integration easier.

When I first looked at Tuya Local, it had WeeKett and so off I went, to then find out it was the other WeeKett Kettle, not the version I had. So I ran the standard Tuya integration for a while. 

I then went through quite a process to get the information needed for Tuya Local to support the Kettle I have. This was not for the faint hearted though. My constant criticism for Home Assistant is that documentation is often done by those in the know, and understanding their documentation when you don't know can often be difficult. Also, UI's change so things are no longer in the same place.

Still, within a few weeks the integration was done and it was now local. I really appreciate the developers for the work they do.



You can see that the current water temperature is available, as well as being able to set the desired temperature, which is limited to 70, 80, 90 or 100 as per the kettle itself. Mode is either "Off" or "Electric".


When I look at the entity (A Home Assistant Term) you can see that it shows that it is a water_heater. This is important for what happened next.

Adding the Kettle to Apple Home.

Using the HomeKit Bridge

Initially I used the HomeKit Bridge functionality in Home Assistant. This showed the kettle and some of its capabilities, but it wouldn't allow me to control it. It came across as a "water heater" device. I wondered what the difference was, and realised that other devices I was showing using the same route of integrations were climate devices, so I started looking into the configuration files of the Tuya Local integration and worked out that I could change the config file, and then it would work inside the bridge and thus inside Apple Home.

The problem was, every time I updated the Tuya Local integration, the config file was over-written, and so I'd have to modify it again. So, not a sustainable way to do it.... thus no detail here.

Using a Matter Bridge

I wondered if Apple Home supported water heaters via Matter, and it does. It took quite a bit of effort to find out what Matter devices are supported by Apple Home, but I eventually found a list.

Great, but Home Assistant does not act as a bridge.... natively, only as a controller. The goods news is that HACS is to the rescue again. There are 2 options:

I actually tried both, and I find the Home Assistant Matter Hub to be the better of the two. The developer is very responsive and is doing a fabulous job.

When you have Home Assistant Matter Hub installed, you need to create a new bridge. You can have one bridge for nearly everything, or you can chop it how you like.

Here you can see I created a bridge called "Kettle", and it has a port of 5546 which was automatically assigned based on what I was already using. By default the port is 5540 and, apparently, Alexa will only work with 5540. This is only used at configuration time.

There is Country code. This is supposed to be only necessary if you have issues, but I'd rather head off at the pass, so because I'm in the UK and GB, my country code is GB.

Startup Priority is about what order you want bridges started.

You then get into what do you want to see. There are various options, in this case I used a domain of water_heater. This would pick up all water heaters but, in my case, I only have the one.


if you scroll downwards, you'll see a button that says "Preview Matching Entities", on clicking that you can see we can now see the kettle. Pressing <save> then saves the config and starts the bridge.


Here you can see the Kettle added as a bridge.


and looking at the created bridge:


You can see the Kettle and then, in the top left, the QR code and Matter code to add the bridge to whatever Controller you want to. In our case, to Apple Home.


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You then go through the standard process of adding the Matter Bridge, and then the Kettle as shown above.

When you use the kettle, It will initially show not very much, but when you turn it on by selecting "Heat", you are limited by the capabilities of the kettle. This particular Kettle is 70, 80, 90 and 100C.

Here you can see me heating it to 80C.


Is it Really Useful?

Well, yes. You do have to change your habits a little. Traditionally you would fill the kettle just before you turn it on. Now you have to fill it after you have poured out the water. Although the kettle does have a capability to make sure you don't boil it dry you do actually want to boil water.

I do wish it could tell me how full it is.

As I said at the beginning, this isn't really an automation but a convenience... and, I must admit, a little of me being curious and wanting to play with another piece of technology.


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