Inexpensive Smart Light Bulbs compatible w/ Home Assistant

Hello Community! Just learned about Home Community and of course, my cheaper WiFi smart bulbs (LIGHTINGINSIDE - controlled by Smart Life App) are not compatible. Can anyone make recommendations for less-expensive, compatible bulbs? Looking for something that is plug-and-play, no hub required. Preferably < $10/each. I see some related, recommended articles but most are quite dated. Thanks in advance!

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They work if you use the Tuya interrogation. :slight_smile:

Welcome!

The whole light bulb ā€˜worldā€™ is a wild west.

From my experience there is not a simple solid path to follow. As I have , I think many other do, I have a ā€˜bottom drawerā€™ dedicated to ā€˜great idea by meā€™ light bulbs that ended up being not so great. Unfortunately you may well have such as wellā€¦ and you venture thru the home automation space.

There are a couple technologies (and companies) that integrate probably the easiest in the WiFi universe (other universes: Zigbee, Bluetooth, ā€˜dixie cups with stringsā€™, are a whole nother discussion).

Tasmota and ESPHome are the two WiFi systems that probably integrate the easiest with Home Assistant via WiFi. Look for manufactures that sell bulbs with either or both of these technologies on their bulbs right out of the box.

These two vendors are ones I have direct experience with and recommend:

Kaufman Home Automation
https://kaufha.com/blf10/

Athom

Just to set expectation correctly, many many of the ā€˜smartā€™ light bulbs made today are all made by just a few Asia manufactures. The quality and life span of these more expensive ā€˜smartā€™ bulbs vs. the 100+ year old Edison bulbs is an area for a lot of navel gazing and opining.

Good hunting!

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Teckin selling them cheap in bulks

Use localtuya or flash with tasmota for local control

Unless you NEED color, ā€œsmart lightsā€ are a waste of money. A smart switch and cheap dumb lights do everything that smart lights can do- except color.

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If you do really want colour lights rather than Stephenā€™s very valid comment, then check out:

The good thing with using smart switches and dumb lights is they will still work if HA is down, plus you donā€™t have to worry about people turning off power to the smart lights accidentally. I only use smart lights where I want colour and smart dimmers elsewhere.

I have some Wiz light bulbs on the front of my house. There is a native Wiz integration in HA, so they work local. I have a script that changes the color of the bulbs depending on the time of year, so right now they are red and green, but they will be pink for Valentineā€™s Day, green for St. Patrickā€™s Day, and red, white, and blue for Independence Day. You do need to use the Wiz app to connect the bulbs to your WiFi network, but you donā€™t need to create an account or connect the bulbs to their cloud service. Wiz is part of Signify, which also owns & makes Philips Hue bulbs. I bought my bulbs at Home Depot:
https://www.homedepot.com/p/WIZ-60-Watt-Equivalent-A19-Dimmable-Smart-LED-Color-and-Tunable-White-Wi-Fi-Connected-Light-Bulb-IZ20126081/318911715

Iā€™ve got two Wiz bulbs but I have been having a lot of trouble with them dropping off my wifi and requiring a reboot. Lately it has been almost every day.

Iā€™ve read the same thing elsewhere, but never really experienced it myself. I also never read anything about why this happens. (Bad production run of bulbs? Incompatibility between bulbs and WiFi router? Something else? Who knows!)

I use the OG Google WiFi mesh for my network, and they stay connected pretty well. About every month or two, one of the four bulbs I have will drop off the network. I have an automation that gets triggered when one of these bulbs becomes unavailable, so it turns off the relay in a Shelly, waits 15 seconds, then turns the relay back on. So far, this has worked well and Iā€™m satisfied.

I did look into it initially and the solution was to lock them to an access point (I use Ubiquiti with 3 APā€™s) as well as turn on/off some other setting for them in the router (I canā€™t remember exactly what that was) and this seemed to fix them for a few months, but lately they have gone bad again.

I bought 4 Kauf wifi bulbs, they worked great and were easy to use but after 4 weeks all of them have failed! Iā€™m about to return them, so Iā€™m looking for other tasmota ESP32 based wifi bulbs - with a dimmer, and preferably with RGB.

There are or were also issues with Athom bulbs too:

site:community.home-assistant.io athom bulb fail

A dimmer is really nice since LED bulbs canā€™t really be dimmed using a normal ā€œdimmerā€ switch.

I had some Kauf bulbs with RGB, and using the bluish color for dimmed back lighting to watch the big or little screen is really nice. Itā€™s also nice as a sort of night light or if getting up before sunrise.

Really?





bulb-phillips5
bulb-phillips6

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Yeah youā€™re right that was an exaggeration: I was thinking of the older LED ā€œdimmableā€ bulbs and I meant they donā€™t dim nearly as well as incandescent bulbs - I have some of the recent ones and and yes I can dim them pretty well with the right dimmer switch installed.

In any case, being able to remotely dim lights and colors is quite nice to have. Once I find some reliable ones Iā€™ll be buying some more.

Oh and for RGBWW you can modify the temperature color and still get very bright lights.

Holy PAR Batman! They are selling PAR E27 13W 1300 lm RGBCW bulbs for a dollar each :bulb:Thatā€™s Nuts :peanuts: ! :grinning:

Who are ā€œTheyā€?

Back track on who I replied to.

Waiting for my 100 bulbs to arrive, oh boy Iā€™m gonna be in trouble :shushing_face:

Does anyone know which chipset these lights use?

Might need to make a jig to flash each one if youā€™re getting the whole lot

Yea, I have some work to doā€¦ however since Iā€™m pretty sure I will be banished to the dog house I will have plenty of time. :dog: :hut: :grinning:

Did you try Tuya-Convert on your models? There seem so be some some reference that these SB53ā€™s are esp826x based.