ecolight-jp.comCree was hesitant so as to add a wise bulb to its finest-selling LED lineup, but that modified this year with the addition of the $15 Cree Connected LED. Sharing the build and lighting specs of final 12 months's nicely-reviewed Cree 4Flow LED , the brand new Connected LED adds in a Zigbee radio. Pair it with a control hub, and you will be able to turn it on and off remotely, or schedule automated lighting changes. At launch, Cree's good bulb was considerably married to the Wink Hub , which made sense given that you're going to purchase each off the shelf at Residence Depot. Since then, nevertheless, we have seen official help roll out for added management gateways, including SmartThings and the Philips Hue Bridge . You may add the bulbs to the brand new D-Hyperlink version of the Staples Connect Hub , too, although there isn't official, Zonoff-certified assist simply yet. The bulb works nicely across the entire platforms we have examined it with, and it shares the strong lighting specs of the 4Flow LED that came earlier than it.

Most interesting is the price. At $15 -- just a few dollars greater than you may spend on non-related rivals -- it ties with the GE Hyperlink LED as the most cheap related bulb on the market. For fundamental automated lighting, it's the perfect option we have tested yet, and our current Editors' Alternative winner. Cree adapted its good bulb design from final year's 4Flow LED, packing a Zigbee radio into the present build. That signifies that this isn't a bulb that goes out of its strategy to look fancy or newfangled -- instead, it copies the 4Flow's emphasis on mimicking the silhouette of traditional incandescents. I liked that strategy with the 4Flow, and i like it with the brand new Linked LED too, though some would possibly discover the plastic build to be a bit low-cost-trying, especially when the bulb is turned off. The brand new bulb also shares the 4Flow's convection cooling trick, which makes use of vents to circulate air by means of the body of the bulb, eliminating the necessity for heat sinks.

That helps deliver production costs down, and also implies that the bulb is exceptionally mild for an LED, weighing in at less than 2 ounces. The Cree Linked LED shares the same lighting specs as the 4Flow LED, too, and EcoLight solutions that's largely a good thing. Each claim a light output of 815 lumens, and EcoLight solutions each clocked in even higher than that in entrance of our spectrometer -- 835 lumens for the 4Flow, and a really impressive 872 for the Related LED. In terms of effectivity, the 4Flow puts its light out utilizing eleven watts, however the quantity rises to 11.5 watts for the Connected LED on account of the Zigbee radio's energy draw. After we tested it out, the number was really nearer to 11.1 watts, so Cree's accomplished a great job of maintaining this bulb comparatively environment friendly. Still, it is price noting that both the Philips Hue Lux LED and the Belkin WeMo LED are much more efficient, each drawing less than 10 watts.

Cree also did a very good job with shade temperature right here, touchdown extremely close to the acknowledged 2,700K. At 2,696K, the Cree Linked LED lands closer to the mark than some other sensible bulb we have tested, so if you are choosy about that excellent shade of warm, yellowy mild, you may like this LED. The one place the place Cree's good bulb lags behind no less than a number of the competitors is the shade rendering score, which measures how precisely a given gentle supply illuminates different shades. The Cree Related LED hits a fairly extraordinary score of 80 out of 100, and on condition that both the WeMo LED and the equally inexpensive GE Hyperlink LED hit nearer to 90, I might have preferred to see Cree do higher. To access the Cree LED's sensible features, you will must pair it with a control hub that may translate its Zigbee signal into Wi-Fi. Just like the GE Link LED, the Cree Related LED came out the gate trumpeting Wink help at launch, however quickly expanded its third occasion compatibility to incorporate options like SmartThings, Staples Connect , and the Philips Hue Bridge .

Different platforms provide totally different options -- SmartThings and Philips carry IFTTT help into the picture, as an example -- however on the whole, the automating experience is essentially the same. We examined the bulb on a number of platforms, and by no means ran into any difficulties pairing it or controlling it. No matter which platform you are utilizing, you may be ready to show the Cree Connected LED on or off remotely, dim it, or automate it using whatever controls your system affords. These possible include setting the lights to a timed schedule, or syncing them up with issues like movement sensors. The bulb paired simply with each of the above-mentioned platforms. Wink and SmartThings each have devoted settings and pairing directions for the Cree LED right within the app, which helps. Staples Join does not offer machine-specific support for Cree just yet, nevertheless it was able to detect the bulb as a generic Zigbee system on the first attempt. Syncing the Cree LED with a Philips Hue setup was pretty painless, too, though I wanted to manually reset the bulb through the pairing process so as to help the bridge discover it.

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Pub: 09 Aug 2025 02:35 UTC

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