One of the most popular items within the category of “smart home” has become smart bulbs thanks to the success of companies like Philips, Xiaomi, Lifx and more. Just about every smart home out there has at least one or two bulbs in the mix, likely to grow as prices come down.
Recently, we have been testing out a few models from a sub-brand by Xiaomi known as Yeelight, including their latest natural warm/white bulb and full RGB bulb. Both of which exist within the $20-$30 range and packing all of features you’d expect to find in a smart LED bulb.
Setup
Both bulbs have the exact same process of getting setup. Of course, you will have to download their own app by searching out “Yeelight” in either the Android or Apple app store, or you can scan the barcode provided in the instructions.
You will have to register with a Yeelight account unless you already have one, or a Mi account. Like most smart solutions, there is always a login in the cloud that brings everything together with.
Then you walk right into using the app start with a request for media/file access (pics, music, etc) on your phone. This bit was a little confusing since all of the compatible devices are lights. So what do they need file access for? Well, we have yet to figure that one out as of yet, so we will file that under “strange” for now.
It will take you right to a screen to add your first device. This is where you want to make sure you have the bulb installed and power turned on to the lamp/fixture so that the app will see it. It will ask for location access (for the purposes of scenes later on and what not), then to choose it from the list of detected devices, and then what network you want to join it to. The first time you add a device, it will ask for the network’s login. After that, the credentials are stored for future device adds. This makes the process a little quicker, although your credentials are now stored (no idea what the encryption level or method is).
Now you have the first light setup in the app. From the main you screen you can turn it off or on, or click on the name and be taken to additional options where you can select between color presets, control brightness, create automated scenes, set it up so the color follows the sun from sunrise to sunset, warming the light as the day comes to an end. You can name it and so much more, including of course the ability to manually select the color from a gradient map, covering a pretty large spectrum.
The colors feel pretty darn accurate as well to the color you are choosing, and when paired with a normal LED bulb, you can easily match the colors together so they blend right in. Brightness is also pretty much on the dot when it comes to being 800 lumens. We paired them against a few models of basic Philips LED bulbs (none-smart) and they nearly matched their brightness and color when set to 100% and preset of “home” selected. Not bad!
As mentioned, setup is the same for both models, so adding the full RGB model follows the exact same steps. It doesn’t more than a handful of seconds before you are at the home screen and ready to play with options. There are plenty of presets to choose from compared to the white/warm bulb, although a number of them lead to red-tints that we don’t always agree with. Thankfully, there isn’t a thing you can’t control manually, just like the warm/white model.
Cruising your finger around the color map/gradient, the resulting color of the bulb looks pretty much on the dot to what you are selecting. It can get pretty bright, even within the various color ranges (which is impressive). You get two color maps to browse around, including the same white/warm map you get with the white/warm bulb, as well as the full-color spectrum. You can also set the bulb to pulse through all of the colors (possibly good for parties and similar situations).
You have all of the same control, including setting a timer, schedules, and more, with the addition of “music mode” thrown into the mix.
Both offer a preset called “Candle Flicker” which is a great idea if you want a romantic look or a dungeon theme for Halloween, however it does feel more like a random breathing pulse than a flicker. For it to look proper, the LEDs inside the bulb would have to move around a little too, and of course, with bulbs like this, they are all on or all off and not individually mappable by their app. Thankfully, there are other bulbs on the market specifically for this purpose.
Home Automation & 3rd Party
So using the app, you can accomplish a lot already. However, when you already have a much deeper automation setup within your home, you might find yourself wanting more. In this case, you have a number of options to you.
The bulbs do support Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and IFTTT, allowing for huge opportunities for interacting with various activities, events, and even other devices that support the same services. With this, you can trigger the lights to turn on if the front door is opened, or even something as wild as making them flash when someone tweets about you on Twitter. You are only limited to the recipes you can cook up on IFTTT or by how deeply Alexa or Google can work with your other devices.
However, to take things even further, what if you have a hub that controls everything else in your home? We attempted to join these to a Z-Wave hub using a VeraPlus. To our surprise, there was a plugin available. It’s a 3rd party plugin like most of the plugins on the Vera hubs, but it works.
Choosing to install the plugin, it automatically creates a virtual device within the hub. Diving into its settings screen, you have two options to choose from. “Run Discovery”, where it will attempt to find controllable Yeelights on the network, as well as a manual IP entry field. We ran the discovery option to see what happens. Sadly, it led to “No new devices discovered.” Then, we remembered there was a “LAN Control” option in the bulb’s settings within the app. We cruised to the app and enabled this for both bulbs and ran the discovery again within the Vera. Both lights were instantly detected and added to the devices list. Now the bulbs can be controlled via Alexa, Google, IFTTT and the Z-Wave hub that controls whatever other devices are attached to it. This makes for a pretty versatile smart bulb!
Cons
Nothing is perfect, so you are always going to find something to pick at. For these, there are only a few items thankfully, and most consumers might not even care about these, but they are worth mentioning.
One of these is a delay. There is a 0.5-0.7 second delay when they power on compared to normal LED bulbs that turn on almost instantly. They also vary between each other when turned on at once.
For example, we put 4 lamps in a row, all connected to the same power strip. Using regular LED bulbs in all 4 lamps, they all turned on and off at the same time. Using 2 normal LED bulbs, one Yeelight warm/white and one Yeelight RGB, the regular bulbs came on instantly and the Yeelights came on around 0.5-0.7 seconds after, with the Yeelights showing a 0.1-0.2 difference between each other in the process. They, of course, turn off instantly, along with the regular bulbs (no power is no power, thus lights out across the board!). Turning the Yeelight bulbs off and on from the app also resulted in an instant off, and a variable of around 0.1 seconds in between the two when powered on. So if you have 4-5 of these on the same group (say, Kitchen for example), they will probably all come on in a very fast but random variation. Just in case you are OCD about these kinds of things.
They can also get pretty hot to the touch, so I wouldn’t install them inside an enclosed dome where they can’t breathe properly. You want these within an open lamp/fixture where they are exposed to the air of the room. This being said, this is common with a lot of LED bulbs, which is why sometimes you find bulbs with interesting heat sink solutions wrapped into the design. These just felt a tad hotter than normal, so once again, it was worth pointing out.
Cons: Price is still a bit high, not 100% in sync when operated in groups, not as easy to integrate into larger smart home setups, like Z-Wave or SmartThings.
Our Conclusion
These bulbs really do offer a lot of flexibility. Both the Warm/White and the full RGB models offer everything you’d expect to find in a smart bulb. You have the option of controlling them via their app, as well as Alexa, Google, IFTTT and more thanks to certain third-party plugins that help bridge the gap between the bulbs and certain smart home hubs, like the VeraPlus. I am sure you can probably get these to work with SmartThings as well. The price is still a bit high which shows that smart bulbs still have some time before they make their way to an “everyone has one now” price, but they are still priced well enough to be well competitive. They aren’t 100% in sync when operated in groups, which needs improvement, but I am sure this is a firmware deal that can be resolved eventually. Beyond that, the cons don’t come close to the pros, which makes these bulbs a winning product in our eyes and a lot of fun to try to find ways of integrating them in with other devices, events, and services.
- Warm/White: Buy from Amazon
. - Full RGB Model: Buy from Amazon
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Our Rating | Average Price* $20-$30 |
*Average price is based on the time this article was published
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