Anyone have recommendations for Zigbee A19 bulbs that are 5K in brightness and also dimmable?
I’ve got three old GE Softwhite A19 bulbs and they are 2700, which I didn’t notice until I used a cree 5K and now can’t stand how yellow they are.
I can’t really find good zigbee bulbs on the blackadder list, and even looking at like Amazon I don’t see any (many?) 5K zigbee bulbs in A19 form factor.
The Hue bulbs are the ‘gold’ standard, and I mean ‘gold’ in all the ways. They are probably the best bulb I have found to date. However at USD 40 to 60, ouch. I know it is not in your zigbee request space, however, I have found some very nice, almost to the Hue level of temperature and brightness adjust 15 watt RGBCCW and CCW small in size bulbs that are wifi. These are ‘Tuya’ bulbs with ‘2.9.6 - BK7231T’ Beken chips. They are very easy to convert to 100% local wifi control using the software only CloudCutter steps. At usd price point of 5 for the CCW and 8 for the RGBCCW, I can afford to have 10 or more of them fail over the advertised 10000 hour Hue life specs. As I said, not zigbee, but great light level range from very dim to blinding and a nice temperature range. And really small! If you have a good distributed WiFi setup…something to noodle on. Good hunting! Shop carefully, as these web sites are difficult:
There is the Ledvance one if your set on ZigBee.
But I also have gone WiFi for my bulbs as they are much cheaper. Athom, preflashed with Esphome work great
Thanks. Ya those Hue bulbs are just a little bit too expensive for my taste. I’m sure they are great, but when a regular LED is a few bucks and I can do it with a smart switch, its hard to justify paying for Phillips Hue
Do you have a link to the Athom bulbs that you use? Never done any flashing with ESPHome, so that would be a new experience for me, but I like the fact that they are wifi, no controller to worry about.
I think this is more up my alley, specifically those 500k white, zigbee, great price. I’ve always had the experience you can’t have too much light!
Curious about the color bulbs, I just can’t see my wife being OK with a red / blue colored living room…
You can just opt not to use the color. The nice thing about those is that you can easily adjust the color temperature if you ever decide you aren’t a fan of the 5000k.
As for the red lights, you’d be surprised. I have colored lights in all the bathrooms/bedrooms. When it gets closer to bedtime, they all flip to red. It helps with winding down for the night.
As an aside; inherently 5000k is no “brighter” (from a lux reading) standpoint than 2700k. It just appears brighter because of the whiter light (the only deviation here is that some bulbs are capable of pushing more lux based on the color temp; I think Hue’s are brightest at something like 3000k).
Lightbulbs running Zigbee are one of the most standard things in the IOT world.
Sensors and switches can be a pain when it comes to compatibility. But the light part of Zigbee is very standard and I have yet to find a bulb or lamps that I could not pair.
When it comes to bulbs - then remember that they are consumables· They last a certain number of hours. Much longer than the old incandescent lights . But one day your bulb blows and then it is nice to be able to go to a local shop and buy a new. And if you use the same types in multiple lamps maybe even buy a spare to have on stock.
If you buy some rare Wifi based light, then the replacement is not something you can normally find again and the new light will be something else. That can make replacing a bulb a small project that includes making a new ESPhome setting and flashing. Watch out for the future maintenance.
Make sure that critical lights that are on for longer durations have a reasonable replacement plan.
A Zigbee lamps with a standard E socket can easily be replaced by a compatible bulb. You may buy a Hue bulb and later replace it by an IKEA bulb in same size. All you need to do is remove the old from ZHA, or Deconz, or Zigbee2MQTT and pair the new bulb and maybe rename the light entity to the same as the old and you are good to go again.
Smartplugs and remote switches typically lasta longer than 25000 hours limit and more acceptable to have as special solutions. But the bulb above your dining table and the bulbs in your bathroom better not be long term projects to replace if you want to celebrate silver and gold wedding aniversaries.
They come preflashed and ready to go, no flashing necessary. They also do a Tasmota version if you’d prefer and 7W and 15W variants
In HA can you tune the color? Like you said if I get tired of the 500k I can tune them down, can that be done easily in HA?
I have Athom bulbs as well, they are ‘huge!’ One of the reasons when I ran across the bulbs I cited, I was very interested. They seems to yield the same ‘big guns’ light output as the several much larger bulbs I have tried, including the Athoms, Crees, Kaufman and several other nonames. And they dim to near zero, another important factor IMHO. Yes, I have questions about heat dissipation with bulb size. The whole topic of heat sinks and LED bulbs is another rabbit hole to go down. One measure, if you feel like you had an ‘arm workout’ picking up the bulb, that might be a good thing 
. Back to my point on size aka dimensions of these various bulbs, another ‘factor’ to factor in is whether a bulb will fit the target fixture. While there are standards for socket types, there is zero standards for the physical size of a bulb. It’s a real disappointment when you find what you think is the right bulb or bulbs, but you cannot get them to fit into the fixture.
On another soap box, I think you will find that you miss the warm white after having cool white for a period. This is why having a bulb that can adjust thru the range of color temperatures is the direction to go. The whole topic of how you look, or more specific, how the significant other looks under a light temperature and also eyestrain and the whole topic of effect on sleep and mental wellness. Theater and movie lighting experts (as well as science) have been working on this psych topic for a long time. While it adds cost, adding the RGB channels to a bulb give more control to the possible perceived temperature of light, it’s not about blasting all 5 LED channels at once, it about injecting a bit of RED or a bit of BLUE/GREEN at the ends to really create a beautifully lit room or face. Good hunting!
P.S. I should more exact, in theory there are physical size standards is bulbs. I thing I have found is as the tech has changed, the ‘interpretations’ of these standards seems to be less ‘standard’.
You sold me. I’ll grab two and see what I think.
Thanks!
These look interesting for another house that currently doesn’t have zigbee.
Do they sell them in different type bulbs? Do they sell them on Amazon?
BR30 and GU10.
I can only see the Homekit versions on Amazon. The postage didn’t take long from them, there is local shipping depending on where you are
You can also buy them from Aliexpress
