I was surprised to find that all(?) A19 smart bulbs are 60 watt equivalents (~800 lumens). I need something significantly higher, 75 W.E. or ideally 100 W.E.
A19 means a “regular bulb shape”, not a floodlight or can light. It doesn’t actually have to be exactly A19 shape (few LED bulbs of over 1K lumens are), but it does need to fit an E26 or E27 socket and generally fit in an old-school fixture with a few inches of clearance around the bulb.
This is for the U.S., 120 volts.
Plus I’m looking for it to be dimmable, in the 2700-3000K kelvin range, and with a pretty good round light projection, like you’d expect from an A19. I don’t want something high color temp (5k or 6k). I don’t need or care about ability to change color.
I thought maybe this LE 960-lumen bulb would work, but apparently it won’t work with SmartThings.
For what it’s worth, from what I’ve seen, LED bulbs use less energy per lumen, cost less to run per lumen, and the bulb itself costs less per max lumen, as the lumens go higher. It starts getting crazy good over ~1600 lumens (old 100 watt equivalent), although that’s getting pretty high for consumer use. Still, I’m surprised that all the makers seem to agree that nobody needs more than 800 lumen A19 smart bulbs. Can’t a few products go higher, when you can always stop it down with dimming if you do sometimes want lower? Oh well.
Anyway… Anyone know of an A19 smart bulb over 800 lumens that will work with SmartThings?
Thanks as always JDR, you are great. You’re right - I don’t actually need the A19 form factor per se. Just something that will fit an E26 socket and not be so super huge or awkward it can’t fit in a medium-size pendant light shade.
890 lumens is a start. Maybe I will have to go with the LIFX Color 1000 but that would still be sad considering.
Really surprising there are no bright A19 smart bulbs. Such poor selection. As in, gosh, a 100 W.E. is 1600 lumens. What’s the hold up, hehe. Some dumb LED bulbs are even brighter than that. Isn’t there at least a 1200 lumen E26 smart bulb? Oh well.
Eric, thanks for your concern; right, the choice between switch, socket, or bulb can be tricky. It’s for pendant lights all controlled by one wall switch. I want separately controlled bulbs. One of them needs to be very bright. I don’t want to rewire everything or completely replace all the pendants (they are not smart pendants) when all I need is one bright smart bulb, screw it in, turn it on, done and done, let’s go get a beer.
Alternatively, I guess a smart socket (that can be screwed into a standard E26) would do. Then I can use any dumb bulb I want (within limits). But I also can’t find anything that would work in this regard. I guess I’ll ask about that in another message if there’s not a clear winner in this bulb question.
I imagine I’m not the only person wondering, so this helps others, too. Even if the answer is No, not really.
Since this seems to be true for pretty much all smart bulbs regardless of the protocol, my guess is that it’s heat distribution. You don’t want to overheat the radio.
The LIFX bulbs are definitely hotter than the others. And bigger. The bigger gives them a way to get rid of some of the heat before it gets to the radio, but my guess is that heat is why they’re mostly 60 W equivalents.
Sorry, didn’t see that you mentioned in your first post. I had the bulb prior to SmartThings so I never had the chance to try it out. It doesn’t look like they publish their API and the Amazon review that you linked to, the guy is FOS. Too bad some of the better lighting products out there have piss poor management/marketing. They’re losing sales…
And they are definitely bright. I don’t think I have ever turned them all on at 100% with white because they are too damn bright, lol. In color mode they are fine at 100%.
You should goto a store that has them lit on display. Some Best Buy stores do. You could ask them to show you those at their brightest levels. Both Hue and LIFX are sold there and I have both
This forum is for people who are using the Samsung smartthings home automation platform. So all questions and answers should be in the context of that platform.
Are the NovoStella bulbs integrated with the Samsung SmartThings system? They are not showing up on the list for me, but the list is region specific so they might for someone else.
Nice, @rhconcepts. They have it in blue white (5000K) and warm white (2700K), my preferred. Their lumens/watt for watt-equivalents isn’t even too far off (a standard incandescent 100-Watt gives 1600 lumens).
Looks like the only thing to be careful of is that the bulb’s length is 5.4", but an ordinary incandescent is 4.0". It might be too big, or protrude, in some cases… but it’s easy to measure ahead of time so you know if it’ll work.
It doesn’t have a superlative Amazon rating, but lots of smarthome products don’t have 4+ scores there, seeing as how smarthome stuff can be tricky for consumers in general.
If anyone tries it, let SmartThings forum folks know how its goes. In this thread, or make a new one (and tack a note onto this thread, pointing to it).
The problem with the LIFX is that what it gains in actual lumen you partly lose as its angle is small compared with many bulbs. So if you have it in a pendant light, you will lose all the benefit of light bouncing back from a white ceiling. This could leave you worse off after all.
Ikea has a Tradfri white spectrum bulb that advertises 1000lm. I’ve only seen them as a package with their 5 button remote, but they work perfectly fine with ST.
My only gripe is that their white spectrum ranges from 2200-4000K, and I’d prefer 2700-5000K.
I would like to bump this. I am looking for an A19 with variable white 2200-5600 or so that can dim in the 100-150 watt equivalent range that can be controlled by ST. The plan is to replace the standard fixture bulb above my wife’s sink so she can press a button and turn it to daylight and high brightness when doing makeup and then go back to standard 3200 or so to match the other bulbs when you repress the button or turn the lights on as standard with a light switch.
