Cree was hesitant to add a sensible bulb to its finest-selling LED lineup, but that changed this 12 months with the addition of the $15 Cree Connected LED. Sharing the build and lighting specs of last 12 months's well-reviewed Cree 4Flow LED , the new Linked LED provides in a Zigbee radio. Pair it with a management hub, and you will be able to turn it on and off remotely, or schedule automated lighting adjustments. At launch, Cree's smart bulb was somewhat married to the Wink Hub , EcoLight home lighting which made sense given that you're going to purchase both off the shelf at House Depot. Since then, however, we have seen official support roll out for additional control gateways, together with SmartThings and the Philips Hue Bridge . You can add the bulbs to the new D-Hyperlink version of the Staples Connect Hub , too, though there is not official, Zonoff-certified assist just yet. The bulb works nicely across all the platforms we have tested it with, and it shares the sturdy EcoLight home lighting specs of the 4Flow LED that came earlier than it.
Most interesting is the value. At $15 -- only a few dollars greater than you may spend on non-connected opponents -- it ties with the GE Hyperlink LED as essentially the most cheap linked bulb on the market. For primary automated lighting, it's the most effective possibility we've examined yet, and our current Editors' Selection winner. Cree adapted its sensible bulb design from final yr's 4Flow LED, long-life LED packing a Zigbee radio into the prevailing construct. That means that this isn't a bulb that goes out of its method to look fancy or newfangled -- as an alternative, it copies the 4Flow's emphasis on mimicking the silhouette of traditional incandescents. I liked that approach with the 4Flow, and that i like it with the new Related LED too, though some may discover the plastic build to be a bit cheap-looking, particularly when the bulb is turned off. The new bulb additionally shares the 4Flow's convection cooling trick, which uses vents to circulate air through the body of the bulb, eliminating the necessity for heat sinks.
That helps deliver production costs down, and likewise implies that the bulb is exceptionally mild for an LED, EcoLight weighing in at lower than 2 ounces. The Cree Connected LED shares the identical lighting specs as the 4Flow LED, too, EcoLight home lighting and that's largely a great thing. Each claim a gentle output of 815 lumens, and EcoLight home lighting each clocked in even increased than that in entrance of our spectrometer -- 835 lumens for the 4Flow, and a very spectacular 872 for the Related LED. By way of efficiency, the 4Flow places its light out utilizing eleven watts, but the quantity rises to 11.5 watts for the Connected LED on account of the Zigbee radio's energy draw. Once we tested it out, the quantity was actually closer to 11.1 watts, so Cree's completed a great job of keeping this bulb relatively efficient. Still, it's value noting that each the Philips Hue Lux LED and the Belkin WeMo LED are even more efficient, each one drawing lower than 10 watts.
Cree also did a very good job with coloration temperature here, touchdown extremely near the said 2,700K. At 2,696K, the Cree Related LED lands closer to the mark than every other smart bulb we've tested, so if you are choosy about that good shade of warm, yellowy gentle, EcoLight solutions you may like this LED. The one place where Cree's sensible bulb lags behind at least among the competitors is the color rendering score, which measures how precisely a given light supply illuminates different shades. The Cree Connected LED hits a slightly extraordinary rating of 80 out of 100, and given that both the WeMo LED and the equally cheap GE Hyperlink LED hit nearer to 90, I would have liked to see Cree do higher. To access the Cree LED's smart features, you will have to pair it with a control hub that can translate its Zigbee sign into Wi-Fi. Just like the GE Hyperlink LED, the Cree Related LED got here out the gate trumpeting Wink help at launch, but quickly expanded its third occasion compatibility to include options like SmartThings, Staples Connect , and the Philips Hue Bridge .
Completely different platforms offer totally different options -- SmartThings and Philips convey IFTTT help into the image, as an example -- but generally, the automating expertise is basically the same. We examined the bulb on a number of platforms, and by no means ran into any difficulties pairing it or controlling it. Regardless of which platform you're using, you may be in a position to turn the Cree Linked LED on or off remotely, dim it, EcoLight energy or automate it using no matter controls your system gives. These probably embrace setting the lights to a timed schedule, or syncing them up with issues like motion sensors. The bulb paired simply with every of the above-talked about platforms. Wink and SmartThings each have devoted settings and pairing instructions for EcoLight home lighting the Cree LED proper within the app, which helps. Staples Join does not supply gadget-specific support for Cree simply yet, but it surely was capable of detect the bulb as a generic Zigbee gadget on the first try. Syncing the Cree LED with a Philips Hue setup was fairly painless, too, though I needed to manually reset the bulb throughout the pairing course of so as to assist the bridge find it.