We’ve reviewed a lot of sensible light bulbs here at PCMag, and whereas we have but to seek out one that does it all, the Yeelight Good LED Bulb comes fairly darn close. It is dimmable, provides sixteen million colours, EcoLight smart bulbs and connects to your own home community wirelessly, without the necessity for a hub or bridge. It helps Apple HomeKit, IFTTT, and Alexa, Google, and Siri voice commands, and it is comparatively reasonably priced at $25.99. It also presents a user-friendly app that permits you to configure lighting results and EcoLight create lighting schedules. All this earns it our Editors’ Selection for affordable good bulbs. The Yeelight bulb is a dimmable bulb with a 16-million colour palette, a 1700K to 6500K white colour temperature vary, and an 800-lumen brightness score equivalent to a 60-watt bulb. It has an E26 base and can match any normal lamp socket. The bulb is 4.6 inches in length and 2.2 inches broad, and has an expected lifespan of 22 years (based on three hours of use per day).
Inside is a 2.4GHz Wi-Fi radio that’s used to attach the bulb to your house network and cell app. The cellular app for Android and iOS is straightforward to make use of and affords some neat lighting effect options. It opens to a System display screen with tabs for all your Yeelight bulbs that include their identify, standing (on-line, offline), and an On/Off button. Tapping any tab takes you to a display screen the place you may customize the bulb by deciding on a colour from the shade palette, choosing a white shade temperature, setting the bulb’s brightness stage, and selecting Move Mode, which runs the shade gamut between yellow and blue. Circulate Mode settings allow you to management the circulate speed for rapid or gradual shifts from colour to shade and adjust the brightness level while in this particular mode. The app additionally offers preset shade scenes equivalent to Sunrise (reddish), EcoLight Night Mode (dim and warm), Movie (blue), Romance (a gradual shift from dark blue to crimson), and Candle Flicker (mimics a candle), and there’s a Music Move setting that adjustments colours primarily based on music and other sounds using your telephone’s microphone.
Additional settings permit you to create lighting schedules and EcoLight set timers to have the bulb automatically turn off after a set time frame. Again at the Gadget web page, there are three buttons at the bottom of the display screen. Tap the Scene button to create a one-touch icon to have the bulb activate or off and change coloration states. Tapping the Room button helps you to create rooms and control a number of bulbs in a group, and the Gadget button takes you back to the System display screen. The Yeelight works with Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, and Google Assistant voice commands, and EcoLight solutions you may make it a part of your HomeKit dwelling automation system and include it in HomeKit Scenes; it also works with SmartThings. It isn’t quite as versatile as Philips Hue bulbs, which work with a wide range of good residence platforms including Logitech, Vivint, Wink, and Xfinity Home. That said, you can create IFTTT applets to have the Yeelight integrate with different IFTTT-enabled sensible home gadgets comparable to cameras, doorbells, EcoLight and plugs.
Setting up the Yeelight is simple. I downloaded the app, created an account, and verified it through email. I tapped the Gadget button at the underside of the display, tapped Add Machine, and selected the LED Bulb (Shade) from the list. Following the app instructions, I screwed the bulb into a lamp socket, tapped Next Step, chosen my Wi-Fi SSID, and entered my Wi-Fi password. I then went to my cellphone’s Wi-Fi settings, connected to the Yeelight SSID, waited around 12 seconds for the bulb to be added to the Machine record, and the set up was full. The Yeelight delivered rich colours and a wide range of cool blue to warm yellow shades of white light in our tests. It responded quickly to app commands to turn on and off, change colours, and dim brightness ranges, and the Move Mode, Schedules, Timer, and Music Move features worked perfectly. The bulb had no hassle responding to Alexa and Siri commands to turn on and off or change colors, and HomeKit scenes worked with out issue.