My Electrician Picked These Sockets. I Had to Figure Out Home Assistant Myself.

Filed under: Home Automation, Home Assistant

There is a particular kind of smart home problem that starts before you have even opened the box. Mine started when my electrician turned up, did a perfectly clean job wiring two new double sockets, handed me the packaging, and said “these are nice ones.”

The model? BG 922/HC. I had never heard of them. I had not researched them. I just nodded, because that is what you do when a competent professional tells you something is fine.

He left. I stared at the box. Then I did what any reasonable person running a Raspberry Pi with Home Assistant OS does — I immediately started wondering how awkward this was going to be.

Quite awkward, as it turns out. But entirely manageable. Here is exactly what I did — including the bits that went wrong.

What Actually Are These Things?

Before anything else, a few hard facts worth knowing:

• 2.4GHz Wi-Fi only — 5GHz is not supported and will cause you grief
• Individual gang control — each double socket gives you two independently controllable switches
• No power monitoring whatsoever — there is no energy metering on this device at all
• Cannot be flashed with Tasmota or ESPHome — it does not use an ESP chip, so do not waste an afternoon trying

If energy consumption monitoring was part of the plan, these will not help you. A Shelly 1PM behind the socket or a separate inline monitoring plug are the practical alternatives. These are on/off switches and nothing more.

The Naive Plan (That Was Never Going to Work)

First instinct: download the BG Home app, pair the sockets, job done — then bridge it to Home Assistant somehow. IFTTT, maybe. A cloud integration. Something.

This is the path for people who have not yet learned to viscerally distrust cloud integrations. I have learned. I still had the instinct.

To be fair to BG, their marketing does nothing to suggest there is a better route. The box says “no expensive gateway hub.” What it does not say is that the device ships with a security lock enabled by default that prevents any other system — including Home Assistant — from authenticating with it.

The sockets run on the Broadlink protocol, the same underlying system used by Broadlink’s own smart plugs and universal remotes. Home Assistant has a native Broadlink integration that supports the BG800/BG900 device class directly. No custom components, no HACS required. That integration is the correct path.

The problem is the lock.

Before You Touch Anything — Network Prep

Do this in the right order and you will save yourself a frustrating afternoon. I thought about it carefully beforehand. I will also drop some breadcrumbs for when things do not go quite to plan — because they did not, for me.

Connect one socket at a time. I wired both but only powered one initially. The moment it joined the network I checked the router’s connected client list. Worth noting: I expected the MAC prefix to start with 24:df:a7: based on most Broadlink guidance online. It did not. These are manufactured by Luceco and the MAC starts with E8:16:56. The socket helpfully broadcasts the last six characters of its own MAC as its temporary SSID during setup, which is actually how I confirmed it. Either way — one socket at a time means you know exactly which device is which without pulling anything off the wall.

Assign a static DHCP reservation. Once you have the MAC address, log into your router and tie a fixed IP to it. Home Assistant is considerably happier with devices on predictable addresses. I just used whatever IP the router had already assigned on first contact and reserved that — no need to overthink it.

Check your Wi-Fi band before you start pairing. These are 2.4GHz only. If you run separate SSIDs for 2.4GHz and 5GHz — I do — make sure your phone is explicitly connected to the 2.4GHz network before you open the BG app. Do not assume your phone will pick the right one. Go into Wi-Fi settings and confirm it. The BG app configures the socket onto whichever network your phone is currently on, and if that is 5GHz you will be resetting the socket and starting again.

If your IoT devices live on a separate VLAN with outbound internet blocked, the BG app needs to reach the internet during initial pairing or it will fail partway through. You will need to temporarily allow outbound access. My setup is everything on one network, so this was not a consideration for me.

The Lock Problem — And the Workaround That Actually Works

Here is where the official documentation runs out and the forum archaeology begins.

The 922/HC’s security lock means the Broadlink integration in HA will find the socket on the network but throw an “attention required” error and refuse to complete authentication. The standard Broadlink app will not pair with these at all — it simply cannot see them. The BG Home app can pair them, but recent versions have no obvious “disable lock” option anywhere.

What does work — and was confirmed working as recently as September 2025 on the Home Assistant community forums — is intercepting Home Assistant’s auto-discovery window during the BG app’s pairing sequence, before the BG app finishes its cloud handshake with the socket. The timing is the whole trick.

You need two devices: your phone running the BG app, and something else — a laptop, a tablet, anything with a browser — with Home Assistant already open.

Get Home Assistant ready before you touch the socket. Open HA, go to Settings → Devices & Services, and leave it sitting there. You want to be one tap away from “Add Integration.”

1. Hold the left button for roughly 10 seconds until the lights flash rapidly. Then hold again for about 5 seconds. The lights will go out and come back with a slow pulse in roughly 3-second bursts. That slow burst pattern is AP mode. If you only get rapid flashing and nothing changes, you have done the first press but missed the second — hold again.
2. On your phone, confirm you are on the 2.4GHz SSID. Open the BG Home app and log in.
3. Add Device → WiFi Equipment → Manual Setup → AP Setup Mode
4. Turn off mobile data on your phone. This forces it onto Wi-Fi only so it can reach the socket’s temporary network.
5. Go to your phone’s Wi-Fi settings. You will see a new network beginning BG***** — those last characters are your socket’s MAC. Connect to it.
6. Back in the BG app, enter your 2.4GHz SSID and password when prompted.
7. The app will begin searching for the socket on your network. Watch for it to indicate the device has been found.
8. Stop here. Do not tap anything further in the BG app.
9. On your laptop: HA → Settings → Devices & Services → Add Integration → search Broadlink. HA should auto-discover the socket. Confirm and add it.
10. Once HA has confirmed the device is added, close the BG app entirely. Turn mobile data back on. You are done with the BG app.

Repeat for the second socket, one at a time.

If HA does not auto-discover during that window — it sometimes misses it — go to Add Integration → Broadlink → Configure manually and enter the static IP from your router. That is the reliable fallback and works just as well.

One alternative worth knowing about: the Broadlink Universal TV Remote app (not the standard Broadlink app — a different one, confusingly named) has an explicit option to disable the device lock, after which HA picks the socket up without any interception gymnastics. I did not need it, but it is there if the timing method defeats you.

What Lands in Home Assistant

Each 922/HC creates two switch entities. Some sources describe them as “left” and “right.” Mine came through as 1 and 2. I suspect that varies by manufacturing batch or firmware version — either way, you will know which is which once you tap them.

Rename them immediately, before adding the second socket. Generic auto-generated names across two identical devices is a reliable route to an afternoon of confusion. Something like switch.kitchen_socket_1 and switch.kitchen_socket_2 — location first, gang second — and your future self will thank you.

From there they behave like any other switch in HA*. Dashboards, automations, schedules — all straightforward. The individual gang control is genuinely useful if you have two separate appliances plugged in and want independent automation of each.

* See the note about Airtime Fairness below — mine would not correctly report their current state until I sorted the router settings.

The Bits Nobody Puts in the Box

A few things worth knowing that I would have liked to have read before starting:

Physical button presses do not always sync back to HA. Home Assistant can command these sockets reliably — on, off, done. But if someone walks over and presses the physical button, HA’s state may not update until the next poll cycle, if at all. This is a known limitation of the integration as of mid-2025. Do not build automations that depend on the physical button state as a trigger.

Firmware updates will probably break things. If the BG Home app ever suggests a firmware update, know that there are reports of this snapping the Broadlink integration and requiring a full re-pair from scratch. It is not terminal, but it is an hour you had not budgeted for. I am treating firmware prompts with healthy suspicion.

There is no power monitoring. Said it once, worth saying again. On/off switches. That is the whole feature set on the HA side.

2.4GHz and some routers do not get along. My first socket kept dropping off the network entirely after initial pairing — connected fine, appeared in the router client list, then vanished. No BG SSID broadcasting, no E8:16: MAC anywhere. The socket was powered and physically functional, but had credentials it could not use and was silently failing to connect. Getting it back required holding the left button through the AP reset sequence again — 10 seconds for rapid flash, then 5 more seconds for the slow 3-second bursts — before starting the pairing process over.

The culprit, after about an hour of fault-finding, was my TP-Link Archer AX50. I am running it behind a Virgin Media Hub 3.0 which handles DHCP. Disabling Airtime Fairness and OFDMA in the router’s wireless settings resolved the dropping completely. Apparently these two features — designed to improve network efficiency across mixed-speed devices — do not play nicely with some older 2.4GHz hardware. The BG sockets are, it seems, particular about this. If yours keeps disappearing, that is where I would look first.

So Was It Worth the Effort?

Yes. These are solid, well-made bits of British electrical kit from a manufacturer that has been making wiring accessories for decades. The integration works. The individual gang control adds genuine flexibility. And once you know the interception method, pairing new ones is less of an ordeal than the first time suggests.

The frustrating part is that none of this is documented anywhere official. BG’s literature does not mention Home Assistant. The HA Broadlink integration page does not call out the BG series or explain the lock. You end up piecing the answer together from forum threads, a stray Amazon review, and a bit of trial and error — which is, if I am honest, most of what running a Home Assistant setup actually involves.

If you are in the same position I was — sockets already on the wall, electrician long gone, wondering what on earth to do next — hopefully this is the post that saves you the archaeology. Get your network prep done first, follow the interception method carefully, check your router’s 2.4GHz settings if things start dropping, and you should have them working inside an hour.

And if it all goes sideways, they work perfectly well as normal sockets. Which is, at minimum, something.

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Running HAOS on a Raspberry Pi 5 and slowly making the house do what I tell it to, one integration at a time. Everything on this site comes from direct personal experience — if I have not broken it myself, I have not written about it.

These sockets are available on Amazon — around £30 when I last looked, which is slightly above where they usually sit.