I’m looking to change some of my current light bulbs out and am not having any luck finding something that would suit my needs. To keep it simple, I’m looking for lights bulbs that fit these requirements:
Zigbee compatible for ease to add into HA. Zigbee is a must.
150W equivalent dimmable LED bulb. Lower wattage equivalent is ok, but I want to keep it above 100W equivalent if at all possible. Dimmable is a must.
Adjustable color temperature able to reach 5000K or higher would be preferred, but if not an option, a fixed Daylight Kelvin rating around 4800K or higher. I do not care for or need RGB “party” lights, but I’m fine with such lights if they fit the bill.
Dumb LED bulbs of 150W equivalent rating are plentiful, but Zigbee compatible seem to only come in around the 60W range. Sengled seems to have some bulbs which tick the most important (to me) requirements, but I cannot find most of what they offer for sale anywhere except through thier own website, and various reviews make it seem like it’ll be a 50/50 chance I’ll be taking with them working fine, or being a PITA in regards to reliability. I’ve considered using a Zigbee bulb adapter, but what I have found do not have dimming control (obviously no tunable color temperature either), reviews on them are mixed, and the price of the adapter + LED bulb would be about the same or more then a Zigbee bulb that can dim. Its like all “smart” bulb manufacturers decided that 60W soft white/RGB will be the only bulbs they make.
This might be a stupid suggestion, but why not use 2 or even 3 lamps on the same fixture? I´ve been using the wiz a60 for almost 3 years now, in parts of my house that I needed more lumens I just put 2 of them and command them simultaneously. They have everything you need, dimmable, color temperature, I know they are zigbee, but this is the one feature that you want that I haven’t tested them since I’m still a novice using wifi, to be changed soon ™
I agree there are “dumb” options in the market which are more powerful and more efficient, but I understand this is still a very niche product, and they can’t make all smart options.
And I can recomend the wiz, they have fantastic customer support even helping me with some dumb sh*t I did
I’m sorry if the suggestion is stupid, I just wanted to know why not use more than 1 lamp
I would venture that manufacturers would have difficulty with heat management and device life at these high ratings. They can get very HOT and burn out within warranty.
The beauty of HA is that you can group a number of devices and control them as one. As suggested, maybe wire a number in parallel to get the wattage needed, and do the smarts in software to control them as a group.
Your wallet will thank you as well. Device life will be longer and more reliable, and you could only power up some of them to get lower output.
That’s actually not a bad suggestion, as I have used such adapters in other locations, but for this setup it just really wouldn’t work unless I want to be ducking under each fixture as the ceiling height in the location I need the higher wattage lighting is less then 7 feet.
I will keep it in mind though, as I might be able to make it work, if I can get such an adapter that will extend far enough past the fixture, AND can angle each light so that it lays flat against the ceiling. I should be able to avoid ducking in that case.
There’s dimmable and dimmable. If an LED bulb is marked as dimmable, then it means it’s compatible with “old fashioned” dimming where the voltage is reduced. I’m guessing you don’t have a dial dimmer on the wall, so you don’t want this.
The “modern” approach for LED is that they dim by flashing on and off faster than you can see. All smart LEDs are “modern” dimmable (to my knowledge anyway).
It’s possibly easier to search using lumens - according to this site, 150-incandescent-Watts is equivalent to 27-LED-Watts and both are 2600 lumen. Having said that, the closest single bulb here (Australia) is 2452lm which only uses 18.5W - if the brightness is to be believed (and it’s not Zigbee). Philips Hue are 15W but only claim to be 1600lm (which is must more aligned with the link above). The only brighter ones involve multiple globes or arrays of LEDs.
There is no need for any adapter, you can assign a “helping entity”, sorry if this is not the correct terminology since my HA is in portuguese, it is the last tab in config → devices and services…credit to chat gpt who made me this suggestion, all my fixtures with 2 bulbs I command these helping entity and not the bulb itself…there is an option to do that on the wiz app as it is also the case in tuya smart life app, but since this is a HA forum I will focus on HA solution, if you need any help with this 2 other apps just ask
Blockquote I would venture that manufacturers would have difficulty with heat management and device life at these high ratings. They can get very HOT and burn out within warranty
This makes sense, lets remind ourselfs that most os this light fixtures standard are old as f*** the E26 (north american) and E27 (south american and european) are E for Edison
I don’t want to start up a new thread for something still related to what I’m trying to accomplish. So…
Amazon Prime is in effect, and a 4 pack of Kasa WiFi bulbs is only $22US, compared to the Thirdreality Zigbee 4 pack @ $30US. I already have a couple of Kasa WiFi switches working with HA, so I’m considering these bulbs now. For the price, I can easily grab 2x 4 pack along with those cheap 3-in-1 bulb adapters.
Any opinions on the Kasa WiFi bulbs? Am I correct to assume they will work in HA without the need of thier app, like thier switches do?
A plethora of choices. Individual smart globes, each controlled as seperate entities but paired up in software to act as one, or one smart switch that powers all of the globes that can be cheaper ‘dumb’ globes.
There are also decorative rail mounted LED spotlights that are popular in kitchens that you could use to make it all look very fancy. Your friendly local lighting store should be able to advise what they have in stock.
There are very low profile oyster LED globes which are basically an inverted dish with a strip of LEDs inside and opaque light diffuser cover. They make them only a few cm thick these days which may make it easy for your restricted space. Some have the smarts internal, and others can be wired to a smart switch.
Let us know which option you ended up using.
Assuming that you are looking for a E27 type socket bulb. I’m using these with (so far) pretty good longevity, not quite to your power (really lumen) spec I believe. Finding a high lumen ‘smart’ socket bulb has been a challenge, I think heat is a real problem for this form factor. From my experience even the dumb high lumen bulbs die far too soon from heat. Hue makes a high power bulb in this lumen range, however it’s like buying gold. I can get 4 to 5 of these AliExpress bulbs for the price of one Hue, jury is still out on which lasts. I’ve had no failures, either flickering (which I have found to come up on other AliExpress LED devices) or burn out. I started with these bulbs to see if I could use the RGB LED in addition to the WW & CW to create a studio type makeup lighting in bathrooms. However, never found a useful way to control all 5 LED for this, so I just use the WW & CW. Kelvin range is pretty good, low end of dimming is not as good as I would like (bulbs that go really low are a Holy Grail find IMHO). Bulb/fixture orientation seems to be a large factor in life span, heat going up into the electronics (for example a bulb hanging down) seems to reduce life span.
From my experience, if you find a solution via AliExpress type vendors, plan to buy replacements for the long tail. Cause, from my experience … ‘if it’s good, it’s gone’.
I don’t see why use a smart switch with a smart light bulb, you are just putting to 2 controllers in series… For me I see as putting 2 three way switches on right next to the other, please correct me if I am wrong, I’d love to see a benefit is using both… In my case here I used smart lamps with dumb switches because they offer more, rgb (absolutely superfluous) warm white and cold white (I love them)
The only use case I can think of is to not turn on your lights when you are back from a power outage… I solve this by installing a switch in my pannel in series with the circuit of the lamps, so when it gets reenergized it status go to off… It still flashes me, and if I’m sleep is a little annoying, but it “notifies” me that ac power is back on if I want to turn on the ac or something like that, so I don’t mind, but the wife approval factor definitely decreased
Yeah my experience with these white lable lamps from Ali express was not great, I bought 10 for start and all 10 failed me withing 1-2 months… So I bought the wiz ones, they are a lot more expensive, but also much brighter then the Ali express ones
I have them for 3 years, with some minor issues that the manufacturer help me with, most of them my own fault
So yeah, they are more expensive, but if I had to buy every bulb every 1-2 months… It would be a lot more
This doesn’t fit all 3 of your criteria unfortunately but I had decent success getting a 300W equivalent PAR 56 dimmable LED light working with zigbee by using a wall mount zigbee dimmer from tuya which I built into the case.
It is a high wattage dimmable zigbee lamp but there is obviously no color temperature adjustment since the actual lamp is dumb. The socket for PAR 56 lamps is GX 16D which you will probably not want but you can manage the same thing with any other socket if you are comfortable doing some basic electric work.
Now for the drawbacks of my setup which are unfortunately there:
My light bulb was really expensive (about 100€). If you don’t need the same formfactor as I did (PAR 56) you can very likely find a cheaper dimmable LED which fits your brightness criteria.
The Tuya dimmer sucks. Or maybe it’s just not 100% compatible with my LED. At any rate it causes some light flickering at certain dimming percentages unfortunately.
