Cree was hesitant to add a smart bulb to its finest-promoting LED lineup, but that modified this year with the addition of the $15 Cree Related LED. Sharing the construct and lighting specs of final yr'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 ready to show it on and off remotely, EcoLight or schedule automated EcoLight lighting adjustments. At launch, Cree's sensible bulb was somewhat married to the Wink Hub , which made sense given that you'll buy both off the shelf at Dwelling Depot. Since then, however, we've seen official assist roll out for added management gateways, including SmartThings and the Philips Hue Bridge . You may add the bulbs to the new D-Link version of the Staples Connect Hub , too, though there is not official, Zonoff-certified assist simply but. The bulb works nicely across all the platforms we've examined it with, and it shares the sturdy lighting specs of the 4Flow LED that came earlier than it.
(Image: https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-zrfsy1cc33/images/stencil/original/products/12930/70244/ATI4405-ATI-Straton-Flex-153-G2-Flat-Panel-LED-Light-Anthracite-Gray-main__21965.1753368820.jpg)Most appealing is the worth. At $15 – just a few dollars more than you will spend on non-connected rivals – it ties with the GE Hyperlink LED as probably the most inexpensive linked bulb on the market. For basic automated lighting, it's the most effective option we've examined but, and our current Editors' Selection winner. Cree tailored its smart bulb design from final yr's 4Flow LED, packing a Zigbee radio into the existing build. That means 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 basic incandescents. I liked that strategy with the 4Flow, EcoLight lighting and i like it with the new Related LED too, although some would possibly discover the plastic build to be a bit cheap-wanting, particularly when the bulb is turned off. The new bulb additionally shares the 4Flow's convection cooling trick, EcoLight lighting which uses vents to circulate air through the physique of the bulb, eliminating the need for heat sinks.
That helps convey production costs down, and in addition signifies that the bulb is exceptionally gentle for an LED, weighing in at lower than 2 ounces. The Cree Connected LED shares the identical lighting specs because the 4Flow LED, too, and that is largely a good factor. Both claim a light output of 815 lumens, and each clocked in even larger than that in entrance of our spectrometer – 835 lumens for the 4Flow, and a very impressive 872 for the Connected LED. In terms of effectivity, the 4Flow puts its mild out using eleven watts, however the number rises to 11.5 watts for the Related LED on account of the Zigbee radio's power draw. Once we examined it out, the number was really closer to 11.1 watts, so Cree's performed an excellent job of preserving this bulb relatively environment friendly. Still, it's price noting that both 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 coloration temperature right here, landing extraordinarily near the acknowledged 2,700K. At 2,696K, the Cree Connected LED lands closer to the mark than some other sensible bulb we've tested, so if you are choosy about that good shade of heat, yellowy gentle, you will like this LED. The one place the place Cree's sensible bulb lags behind at the least some of the competition is the coloration rendering rating, which measures how accurately a given mild source illuminates totally different shades. The Cree Related LED hits a rather bizarre score of 80 out of 100, and provided that each the WeMo LED and the equally cheap GE Hyperlink LED hit nearer to 90, I might have liked to see Cree do higher. To access the Cree LED's sensible features, you'll must pair it with a control hub that can translate its Zigbee signal into Wi-Fi. Like the GE Link LED, the Cree Related LED came out the gate trumpeting Wink support at launch, but quickly expanded its third celebration compatibility to incorporate choices like SmartThings, EcoLight lighting Staples Join , and the Philips Hue Bridge .
Different platforms provide totally different options – SmartThings and Philips deliver IFTTT help into the image, as an illustration – but typically, the automating experience is largely 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 may be ready to show the Cree Related LED on or off remotely, EcoLight lighting dim it, EcoLight lighting or automate it using whatever controls your system offers. 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-mentioned platforms. Wink and SmartThings each have devoted settings and pairing instructions for the Cree LED proper within the app, EcoLight which helps. Staples Connect does not provide device-specific help for Cree simply but, however it was in a position to detect the bulb as a generic Zigbee gadget on the first attempt. Syncing the Cree LED with a Philips Hue setup was fairly painless, too, although I needed to manually reset the bulb in the course of the pairing course of so as to help the bridge discover it.