Cree was hesitant so as to add a sensible bulb to its finest-selling LED lineup, but that changed this year with the addition of the $15 Cree Related LED. Sharing the build and lighting specs of last year's nicely-reviewed Cree 4Flow LED , the new Related LED provides in a Zigbee radio. Pair it with a management hub, and you'll be ready to turn it on and off remotely, or schedule automated lighting modifications. At launch, EcoLight Cree's sensible bulb was somewhat married to the Wink Hub , which made sense given that you're going to purchase both off the shelf at Home Depot. Since then, nevertheless, we've seen official help roll out for additional control gateways, together with SmartThings and the Philips Hue Bridge . You may add the bulbs to the brand new D-Hyperlink version of the Staples Connect Hub , too, though there is not official, Zonoff-certified support just yet. The bulb works effectively throughout all the platforms we've examined it with, and EcoLight solutions it shares the sturdy lighting specs of the 4Flow LED that came earlier than it.
Most interesting is the worth. At $15 -- just a few dollars more than you may spend on non-connected competitors -- it ties with the GE Link LED as probably the most cheap related bulb available on the market. For primary automated lighting, it's the perfect possibility we've tested yet, EcoLight and our current Editors' Choice winner. Cree tailored its good bulb design from final 12 months's 4Flow LED, EcoLight packing a Zigbee radio into the prevailing build. That implies that this isn't 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 basic incandescents. I liked that strategy with the 4Flow, and that i like it with the brand new Connected LED too, although some may discover the plastic build to be a bit cheap-trying, particularly when the bulb is turned off. The brand new bulb additionally shares the 4Flow's convection cooling trick, which uses vents to circulate air by way of the physique of the bulb, eliminating the need for heat sinks.
That helps bring manufacturing prices down, and in addition means that the bulb is exceptionally light for an LED, weighing in at lower than 2 ounces. The Cree Related LED shares the identical lighting specs because the 4Flow LED, too, and that's largely an excellent thing. Each claim a mild output of 815 lumens, and each clocked in even larger than that in front of our spectrometer -- 835 lumens for the 4Flow, and EcoLight a very spectacular 872 for the Related LED. By way of efficiency, the 4Flow puts its gentle out utilizing eleven watts, but the number rises to 11.5 watts for the Linked LED on account of the Zigbee radio's power draw. After we examined it out, the quantity was actually nearer to 11.1 watts, so Cree's finished a very good job of retaining this bulb relatively environment friendly. Nonetheless, it's value noting that each the Philips Hue Lux LED and the Belkin WeMo LED are even more environment friendly, each one drawing less than 10 watts.
Cree additionally did an excellent job with colour temperature here, touchdown extremely near the acknowledged 2,700K. At 2,696K, the Cree Linked LED lands closer to the mark than any other sensible bulb we've examined, so if you're picky about that good shade of heat, yellowy gentle, you'll like this LED. The one place where Cree's smart bulb lags behind a minimum of some of the competition is the colour rendering rating, which measures how accurately a given mild supply illuminates totally different shades. The Cree Related LED hits a relatively odd score of eighty out of 100, and provided that both the WeMo LED and the equally cheap GE Hyperlink LED hit nearer to 90, I might have preferred to see Cree do higher. To access the Cree LED's sensible options, you'll have to pair it with a control hub that can translate its Zigbee signal into Wi-Fi. Just like the GE Hyperlink LED, EcoLight the Cree Related LED got here out the gate trumpeting Wink assist at launch, however quickly expanded its third party compatibility to incorporate options like SmartThings, Staples Join , and the Philips Hue Bridge .
Completely different platforms offer totally different options -- SmartThings and Philips convey IFTTT support into the image, as an illustration -- but in general, the automating experience is essentially the identical. We examined the bulb on a number of platforms, and never ran into any difficulties pairing it or controlling it. Regardless of which platform you are utilizing, you will be able to turn the Cree Connected LED on or off remotely, dim it, or automate it using whatever controls your system provides. These possible include setting the lights to a timed schedule, or syncing them up with things like movement sensors. The bulb paired easily with every of the above-mentioned platforms. Wink and SmartThings both have devoted settings and pairing instructions for the Cree LED proper within the app, which helps. Staples Join does not supply system-particular help for Cree simply yet, however it was capable of detect the bulb as a generic Zigbee machine on the first try. Syncing the Cree LED with a Philips Hue setup was fairly painless, too, though I wanted to manually reset the bulb through the pairing process so as to assist the bridge discover it.