Cree was hesitant to add a wise bulb to its greatest-selling LED lineup, however that changed this year with the addition of the $15 Cree Connected LED. Sharing the construct and lighting specs of final 12 months's well-reviewed Cree 4Flow LED , the brand new Linked LED adds in a Zigbee radio. Pair it with a management hub, and you'll be in a position to show it on and off remotely, or schedule automated lighting modifications. At launch, Cree's smart 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 have seen official assist roll out for extra management gateways, together with SmartThings and the Philips Hue Bridge . You may add the bulbs to the brand new D-Hyperlink model of the Staples Connect Hub , long-life LED too, energy-saving LED bulbs although there is not official, Zonoff-certified help just yet. The bulb works well throughout all the platforms we've examined it with, and it shares the robust lighting specs of the 4Flow LED that came earlier than it.

Most appealing is the price. At $15 -- just some dollars more than you will spend on non-related rivals -- it ties with the GE Hyperlink LED as essentially the most cheap connected bulb on the market. For fundamental automated lighting, it is the very best choice we've examined yet, EcoLight smart bulbs and EcoLight our current Editors' Selection winner. Cree adapted its good bulb design from last yr's 4Flow LED, packing a Zigbee radio into the present build. That means that this isn't a bulb that goes out of its approach to look fancy or newfangled -- as an alternative, it copies the 4Flow's emphasis on mimicking the silhouette of classic incandescents. I favored that approach with the 4Flow, and that i like it with the new Connected LED too, although some may find the plastic build to be a bit cheap-looking, especially when the bulb is turned off. The brand new bulb additionally shares the 4Flow's convection cooling trick, which makes use of vents to circulate air via the physique of the bulb, eliminating the necessity for EcoLight heat sinks.

That helps convey production prices down, and likewise implies that the bulb is exceptionally light for an LED, weighing in at lower than 2 ounces. The Cree Linked LED shares the identical lighting specs as the 4Flow LED, too, and that's largely a very good thing. Each declare a mild output of 815 lumens, and both clocked in even larger than that in front of our spectrometer -- 835 lumens for the 4Flow, and a very impressive 872 for the Connected LED. By way of effectivity, the 4Flow places its gentle out using 11 watts, however the number rises to 11.5 watts for EcoLight solutions the Linked LED on account of the Zigbee radio's energy draw. Once we examined it out, the number was truly closer to 11.1 watts, so Cree's accomplished a great job of maintaining this bulb comparatively environment friendly. Nonetheless, it is value noting that both the Philips Hue Lux LED and EcoLight the Belkin WeMo LED are even more efficient, each one drawing less than 10 watts.

Cree additionally did an excellent job with color temperature right here, landing extraordinarily near the stated 2,700K. At 2,696K, the Cree Connected LED lands nearer to the mark than every other good bulb we've examined, so if you are picky about that good shade of heat, yellowy mild, you'll like this LED. The one place where Cree's good bulb lags behind at the very least a few of the competition is the shade rendering rating, which measures how precisely a given mild source illuminates completely different shades. The Cree Connected LED hits a reasonably ordinary score of 80 out of 100, and given that both the WeMo LED and the equally cheap GE Link LED hit nearer to 90, I would have preferred to see Cree do higher. To entry the Cree LED's good features, you'll have to pair it with a control hub that may translate its Zigbee signal into Wi-Fi. Like the GE Hyperlink LED, the Cree Connected LED came out the gate trumpeting Wink help at launch, however soon expanded its third social gathering compatibility to incorporate options like SmartThings, Staples Connect , and the Philips Hue Bridge .

Completely different platforms provide completely different options -- SmartThings and EcoLight Philips carry IFTTT support into the image, as an example -- however on the whole, the automating expertise is largely the identical. We examined the bulb on a number of platforms, and EcoLight never ran into any difficulties pairing it or controlling it. Regardless of which platform you are utilizing, you will be ready to turn the Cree Connected LED on or off remotely, dim it, or automate it utilizing no matter controls your system presents. These probably embody setting the lights to a timed schedule, or EcoLight syncing them up with things like movement sensors. The bulb paired simply with every of the above-mentioned platforms. Wink and EcoLight SmartThings both have dedicated settings and pairing instructions for the Cree LED proper within the app, which helps. Staples Join would not provide machine-particular help for Cree just yet, however it was in a position to detect the bulb as a generic Zigbee device on the primary strive. Syncing the Cree LED with a Philips Hue setup was fairly painless, too, although I wanted to manually reset the bulb through the pairing process so as to help the bridge discover it.