Every building has rooms nobody quite owns. The laundry room. The bike store. The shared workshop in the basement. The guest room nobody remembers to check. These spaces usually run on a single switch, or no switch at all, and nobody notices until something is left on for a week, or a resident wants to run something there isn't an outlet for.
A smart outlet changes very little about how a room looks, and a surprising amount about how it's managed. Moduel is a modular, Matter-compatible outlet system: individual modules click together to build exactly the layout a room needs, and each one can be scheduled, switched remotely, or checked on from a phone. It's the same system behind IKEA's ÅSKVÄDER range, built to the same 16A 250V safety standard with full earthing and shutter protection, now sold as its own product line with a wider set of modules.
For a housing association or a property manager, the appeal isn't a smart home for its own sake. It's four ordinary jobs done better.
The laundry room is the obvious one. Washers and dryers run on fixed schedules that residents rarely respect, and a socket that's always live is a socket nobody is responsible for. Scheduling it to switch off overnight, or checking from a phone whether it's running before sending a technician out, removes a recurring call to the caretaker.
The bike store and workshop are usually unmetered and unmonitored on purpose — residents plug in e-bike chargers, tools, the odd heater, and nobody tracks any of it. Being able to switch a bank of chargers off outside charging hours, or confirm remotely that nothing is still drawing power, is the job here. No usage figures need inventing to make that useful.
The guest room or shared common room sits empty most of the year and is the easiest to forget. An outlet that can be switched on ahead of a booking and off again afterwards means nobody has to remember to do either in person.
None of this requires rewiring the building. Each Moduel module clicks onto the existing fitting, and a Smart Matter Control Module turns a standard outlet into one you can see and control from a phone. Because it runs on Matter — the open smart home standard, not a closed app — it also sits alongside whatever else the building already has: smart locks, lighting, heating controls, whoever made them. You're not locked into one supplier for the next ten years.
Running a one-room pilot
The easiest way to test this is not to commit to a full building. Pick one shared room — the laundry room is usually the clearest case — and run it for a month. Fit a Smart Matter Control Module on the outlet in question, set a schedule that matches how the room is actually used, and ask whoever manages the caretaker rota to note anything that changes: fewer call-outs, less time spent checking on equipment, residents noticing or not noticing at all. A month is enough time to see a pattern without committing budget to the rest of the building.
Five questions to ask any supplier
Before fitting anything, it's worth asking the same five questions of any system under consideration, Moduel included.
Does it use Matter, the open smart home standard, or does it lock you into one app and one brand? Is it certified for the electrical standards used in Swedish buildings, with full earthing? Does it keep the shutter protection a standard Schuko outlet has, or does retrofitting remove it? Can one module be added at a time, or does the system require buying a fixed kit you don't need in full? And what does support look like after installation — a help line, a local contact, or nothing?
A system that can't answer all five plainly isn't ready for a shared building, whatever it promises.
Where to start
A Smart Matter Control Module is the simplest way to try this on a single outlet. For a room that needs several outlets built out at once — a workshop with multiple benches, say — a Start Kit Smart Schuko gives a small bank of connected outlets from the start, built the same way: click modules together, add more later if the room's needs change. Neither commits a building to more than it needs. That's deliberate. The point of a one-room pilot is to answer the five questions above with your own data, not someone else's marketing.
If a laundry room, bike store or workshop in your building sounds like the room described here, reply to this and we'll talk through what a one-month pilot would look like for your building specifically — no obligation, and no sales call disguised as a product demo.