Here's an easy way to start your own smart home

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CreeI spend my days testing $1,000 headphones, flying miniature drones, and wearing way too many smartwatches, but for the past two weeks, the piece of tech I’ve been happiest to use is a $15 light bulb.

More specifically, I’ve been using Cree’s Connected LED Bulb, a no-frills yet altogether effective way to get started with connected lighting, which itself is one of the easiest routes into making your home smarter. I used both the Soft White and Daylight versions of the 60W-equivalent bulb, and found them both to be easy recommendations for anyone who wants greater control over, or just wants to have a little fun with, their lighting.

First, let’s get the big caveat here out of the way: Neither bulb works entirely on its own, instead requiring you to run them through a smart home hub.

For me, that was the Samsung SmartThings Hub, which, some minor app-related quirks aside, caused minimal fuss in letting me sync and name each bulb, turn them off and on, change brightness levels, create automated lighting schedules, and so on. It’s also one of the handful of hubs to support IFTTT recipes, letting you link the bulbs to all sorts of devices and services. If you don’t have a hub to begin with, I’m comfortable recommending it.

But all this is to say that how well the bulbs work, and exactly what you can do with them, is at the mercy of which hub you use. It also means that the $15 price tag is slightly deceiving. On the plus side, Cree does support a fair amount of devices, including the Amazon Echo, Philips Hue Bridge, and Wink, WeMo, and ZigBee products. Just try to keep an eye out for any snafus reported by other users of your chosen hub.

Once you’re set up, though, both Connected LED Bulbs perform admirably. You shouldn’t pay $15 for any LED bulb without smart features, but it’s worth noting that each model is a good bulb in its own right. Cree says the two A19-shaped bulbs max out at 815 lumens, and in practice they can indeed get nice and bright. The Soft White’s warmer, yellowish glow is relaxing for, say, reading in bed, while the Daylight’s piercing white light can sufficiently illuminate a pitch black room. They ventilate well and stay relatively cool. They all do well to direct that light in all directions, something that’s been an issue with Cree’s closest competitor, the GE Link.

Cree

The only real hangup is that they don’t work well with traditional dimmer switches — you’ll have to stick to your hub’s app to take care of that. They aren’t capable of any Philips Hue-style color changing either, but for a quarter of the price, that’s at least somewhat easier to swallow.

Because they’re LED bulbs, they'll also last longer and use up less energy than your everyday incandescent or CFL alternative. Cree claims the two will each last 25,000 hours — so, about 3 years’ worth of use — and use up to 11.5 watts of power, both of which should help the bulbs pay themselves off over time, and then some.  

That’s only helped by how painless their smart features are. With the SmartThings Hub, for instance, I made it so the Soft White turned on at six in the morning, at 80% brightness, giving me a sort of makeshift wake-up light. Another time, I had the Hub automatically turn the lights on once it sensed my phone returning home. Whatever I asked, the bulbs consistently did as they should, without much of any delay.

Beyond that, not having to manually flip all your light switches off at night is a blessing — albeit a lazy one — and being able to dim your lights to whatever level makes you comfortable at a given time is something that’s hard to give up once you’ve had it. Plus, aside from the money savings and general convenience, this kind of tech just fun to use. When it works, it feels futuristic.

And the Cree Connected LED Bulb works well. If you’re interested in building your own smart home, it’s a simple, functional, and enjoyable place to start.

Cree Connected 60W LED Bulb (Soft White), $14.97, available at Amazon.
Cree Connected 60W LED Bulb (Daylight), $14.97, available at Amazon.
Samsung SmartThings Hub (2nd Gen), $99, available at Amazon.