What smart light bulbs can go really dim (candlelight dim)

Hardware
1

I’m looking to replace an incandescent light wakeup system with HA controlling some smart lightbulbs. My first attempt was to use Tasmota CloudFree bulbs. I’m an experienced programmer, but new to Home Assistant. It seems that setting the brightness to 1% is still too bright. Even setting the color to red is still too bright. Perhaps I am naive in setting brightness to integer percentages. Perhaps I am using the wrong type of light bulb. I just don’t know and looking for someone more experienced to give me suggestions. --Thanks

2

1% brighness is going to be an integer brightness of 3 (max = 255).

So if a third of your 1% is dim enough try specifying brightness: 1 (integer from 1 to 255) instead of brightness_pct: 1.

Otherwise LIfx lights go quite dim but without anything to compare it to I’m not sure if it will be dim enough for you.

3

I haven’t tested all my lights for this, but I noticed that my Gledopto GU10 bulbs go a lot lower in mimimal intensity than my Innr E14 bulbs. Candlelight dim is the right ballpark for those. edit: looked up the type nrGL-S-007Z(lk) )

4

I have generic Tuya, Ikea, Hue and Lifx bulbs. The Hue and Lifx are good at being quite dim, whereas the generic and Ikea are fairly poor. So you probably get what you pay for.

5

I had the same question when I started, and didn’t see good smart bulb options. I obviously couldn’t try all but every led bulb I tried, even at the lowest brightness, are (or were) still too bright if you want candlelight level.

It is easier to find dumb bulbs that could go really dim… so in the end I went dumb bulbs + smart switches route.

Was told that if we run 24V circuits for 24V LED bulbs they could be amazing - it’s a rabbit hole and I couldn’t do that.

There were this thread. And I’m still searching good dumb bulbs.

6

I may have to add that the lights I mentioned are rgbww lights, and they only go really low in color mode, but candlelight is way too low incolor temperature for white LEDs to emulate well anyway.

7

I came to the same conclusion as @k8gg that the LED bulbs would not go low enough in lumens. I tried FEIT, Phillips, Cree, and several others. None of them stated what the number of lumens were on the low side. All of them were jarring when coming on in a completely dark room. Using the sunrise colors etc. were somewhat pretty, but still too bright.

My conclusion was that today, I probably needed to use an incandescent light with an external dimmer. Effectively what the device did that I had before. I looked for such a device, and the best I found was the Lutron Caseta Single-Pole/3-Way Smart Lighting Lamp Dimmer. There were many devices to control single lightbulbs, but they were almost all simply switches and didn’t work with incandescent bulbs. The Lutron device at brightness 1% (it doesn’t respond to brightness) is about as bright as the back light on my clock. A simple automation raises the brightness slowly emulating sunrise.

The Lutron device works with LED bulbs also, and perhaps it can get them dim enough for my wife, but I haven’t tested that case. It can handle up to 300 watts of incandescent light.

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