That Helps Carry Production Prices Down

Cree was hesitant so as to add a smart bulb to its greatest-selling LED lineup, but that changed this yr with the addition of the $15 Cree Related LED. Sharing the build and lighting specs of final year's properly-reviewed Cree 4Flow LED , the brand new Connected LED provides in a Zigbee radio. Pair it with a management hub, and you'll be in a position to turn it on and EcoLight reviews off remotely, or EcoLight schedule automated lighting adjustments. At launch, Cree's good bulb was considerably married to the Wink Hub , which made sense given that you're going to buy both off the shelf at Home Depot. Since then, however, we've seen official support roll out for extra control gateways, including SmartThings and the Philips Hue Bridge . You'll be able to add the bulbs to the brand new D-Link version of the Staples Connect Hub , EcoLight outdoor too, though there isn't official, Zonoff-certified assist simply yet. The bulb works effectively across all of the platforms we've tested it with, and it shares the strong lighting specs of the 4Flow LED that came earlier than it.



Most appealing is the price. At $15 -- only a few dollars more than you'll spend on non-connected competitors -- it ties with the GE Hyperlink LED as the most cheap linked bulb available on the market. For primary automated lighting, it is the very best possibility we have examined but, and our current Editors' Alternative winner. Cree adapted its smart bulb design from final yr's 4Flow LED, packing a Zigbee radio into the existing build. That implies that this is not a bulb that goes out of its strategy to look fancy or newfangled -- as a substitute, it copies the 4Flow's emphasis on mimicking the silhouette of traditional incandescents. I favored that strategy with the 4Flow, and i prefer it with the new Connected LED too, though some may discover the plastic construct to be a bit cheap-wanting, especially when the bulb is turned off. The brand new bulb also shares the 4Flow's convection cooling trick, which uses vents to circulate air via the physique of the bulb, eliminating the necessity for heat sinks.



That helps bring manufacturing costs down, and likewise means that the bulb is exceptionally light for an LED, weighing in at less than 2 ounces. The Cree Linked LED shares the identical lighting specs as the 4Flow LED, too, and that is largely a good factor. Each declare a gentle output of 815 lumens, and each clocked in even larger than that in entrance of our spectrometer -- 835 lumens for the 4Flow, EcoLight outdoor and EcoLight outdoor a very spectacular 872 for the Related LED. By way of efficiency, the 4Flow puts its gentle out using 11 watts, EcoLight but the quantity rises to 11.5 watts for the Linked LED on account of the Zigbee radio's power draw. Once we tested it out, the quantity was truly closer to 11.1 watts, so Cree's finished a very good job of keeping this bulb comparatively environment friendly. Still, it is worth noting that both the Philips Hue Lux LED and EcoLight outdoor the Belkin WeMo LED are even more efficient, every one drawing lower than 10 watts.



Cree additionally did a very good job with shade temperature here, landing extraordinarily near the acknowledged 2,700K. At 2,696K, the Cree Connected LED lands closer to the mark than every other sensible bulb we've tested, so if you are picky about that good shade of heat, yellowy gentle, you'll like this LED. The one place where Cree's good bulb lags behind at the very least among the competition is the coloration rendering rating, EcoLight outdoor which measures how accurately a given light source illuminates completely different shades. The Cree Related LED hits a rather strange rating of 80 out of 100, and EcoLight smart bulbs given that both the WeMo LED and the equally inexpensive GE Hyperlink LED hit closer to 90, I might have preferred to see Cree do better. To access the Cree LED's sensible features, you may have to pair it with a management hub that may translate its Zigbee signal into Wi-Fi. Just like the GE Link LED, the Cree Related LED got here out the gate trumpeting Wink help at launch, but soon expanded its third get together compatibility to incorporate options like SmartThings, Staples Join , and the Philips Hue Bridge .



Different platforms offer different features -- SmartThings and Philips convey IFTTT assist into the picture, as an illustration -- but usually, the automating expertise is largely the identical. We examined the bulb on multiple platforms, and by no means ran into any difficulties pairing it or EcoLight outdoor controlling it. Regardless of which platform you're using, you may be able to turn the Cree Connected LED on or off remotely, dim it, or automate it utilizing whatever controls your system provides. These likely embody setting the lights to a timed schedule, or EcoLight products syncing them up with things like movement sensors. The bulb paired easily with every of the above-talked about platforms. Wink and SmartThings both have devoted settings and pairing instructions for the Cree LED right within the app, which helps. Staples Connect doesn't offer device-specific help for Cree just but, but it surely was able to detect the bulb as a generic Zigbee device on the first strive. Syncing the Cree LED with a Philips Hue setup was pretty painless, too, though I wanted to manually reset the bulb through the pairing course of in order to assist the bridge discover it.