Sengled 4-Pack Smart Light Bulbs, Zigbee Hub Required, Works with Alexa, Google Home, SmartThings

Discovered easily as zigbee device and responds well. Would recommend.

I bought 6 of these in 2017 and half of them are dead. At about the 3 year mark (around the warranty date), half of them worked pretty sporadically. Either they’d flicker on and off every 2-5 seconds, wouldn’t turn on at all, or only turn on with 1% brightness. Eventually, they stop working entirely. Sure, the LED itself will last 20 years, but the circuitry that enables the bulbs to work doesn’t. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s intentional, counting on customers to replace bulbs to get new smart features long before the hardware craps out. Long before the bulbs started having problems, I gave up on home automation. It’s really not worth the effort, due to lousy implementation industry-wide. They created multiple open standards, but companies like Philips added their own spin to the standard such that you had to only use Philips Hue bulbs with the Hue hub. Nominally, they’d work with other brands, but not as well. All home automation brands insisted on cloud-based implementations that were flaky and slow. I’m guessing they realized selling people’s data about lightbulb usage wasn’t that valuable and stopped maintaining their servers or just abandoned them, turning your smart appliances dumb. One hub/cloud system decided it needed to switch to a subscription model to stay in business. Then they went out of business. Open source solutions are fragmented and you have to spend hours installing and configuring, and if it doesn’t work, you have to spend hours more trying a different solution. Finding out if your smart devices are supported by an open-source platform is nearly impossible. That’s because (as is typical with open standards), nobody implements the standards correctly, or in quite the same way (because sometimes the standards are ambiguous), so that the hubs and apps that support them are doomed to fight an unending stream of compatibility bugs, and the hacks to work around them break the devices that follow the standards. De facto standards arise because the most popular brand must be supported, no matter how incorrectly they implement the standard, which makes the de facto standard a moving target as what is popular changes over time. Even when the systems were at their peak, home automation was a huge waste of time. Alexa had recurring bugs that required reconfiguring the entire home automation set up every 6 months. You leave a 1-star review on your Echo device and an Amazon tech support person would reach out to you (kudos, Amazon support). Then they’d fix the bug a month later and you’d have to reconfigure your system again. Then 6 months later they’d break it in the same way (boo, Alexa engineers). When it wasn’t completely buggy, the voice commands would only work 75% of the time. Me: “Alexa, turn on the Hall Lights” Alexa: “I couldn’t find the device ‘All Lights’” Me: ??? “Alexa, turn on all lights” Alexa: turns on all lights Me: ???? “Alexa, turn off Hall Lights” Alexa: “I couldn’t find the device ‘All Lights’” Me: “WTF, Alexa, turn off all lights” Alexa: turns off all lights Me: “OMFG ALEXA TURN ON THE HALL LIGHTS OR I WILL KILL YOU” Alexa: “Today’s weather will be cloudy with a high of…” Me: rename ‘hall’ group to ‘hallway’ Me: “Alexa, turn on hallway lights” Alexa: “I could not find the device named ‘Lighthouse’.” Me: ‘ALEXA. TURN. ON. HALL. WAY.’ Alexa: pauses for 15 seconds, turns on one of 3 bulbs in the hallway group, but at 50%. Me: “JFC, I’ll use the app.” Other smart home apps would routinely fail at location-based and time-based triggers. Or the manual controls in the app just wouldn’t respond or would be out of sync. At some point, I realized I was spending more time fiddling with the home automation system to do things automatically than it would take to operate them manually, so I stopped using them. The lamp that was awkward to turn on and off because of its location and 3 separate bulb switches got a floor switch. I’ve got an accent lamp near the main door that I leave on so I’m not coming home to darkness. Home automation has been a thing since X10 in 1975, almost 50 years ago. Maybe in 2072, after I’m dead, we’ll have something that works. In the meantime, buy dumb LED bulbs from a reputable brand. They’re cheaper and last longer and just work.

Bought these to be controlled by my SmartThings home automation. They pair easily and I haven’t had any problems with them yet

I've purchased several of these bulbs and have been using them for a few years now. Under certain conditions, these have been very reliable and put out sufficient light. They integrated fairly easily with my Wink hub and later with my SmartThings Hub when Wink moved to subscription services. The only issue there was 50/50 success using the QR code during setup, and sometimes having to reset the bulb to get it to connect initially. As an early adopter of smart LED bulbs, I learned quickly that most "dimmable" LED bulbs do not work well with traditional incandescent dimmer controls, and using the term "dimmable" should be qualified as such for those new to smart LED bulbs. In fact, they barely dim at all on those devices. So I was going to pull 1 star for those things plus the fact that using the app to dim the bulbs doesn't get them very dim. While they do dim noticeably, they cannot reach that very soft dim light before shutting off or flickering. Then I noticed that the bulbs in 2 particular fixtures seemed to be failing prematurely. I replaced those bulbs and they failed again less than a year later - each time they stopped being recognized by SmartThings and were assumed to always be ON. That's when I noticed in VERY faint print on the base of the bulbs a statement that they are not to be used in enclosed fixtures. This is a key point of information that is omitted from the product page and should be clearly stated. To make it worse, when I read the "Product Information" pdf on the product page, it puts in bold type on page 3 the following: "Note: The Sengled Element Classic A19 bulbs and Sengled Element Classic BR30 bulbs cannot be used on dimmer switches. This would include wall dimmers, ceiling fan fixtures and 3-way lamps (lamps with low, medium and high power settings built-in). Furthermore, the Sengled Element Classic bulbs are not meant to be used in fully enclosed fixtures. Additionally, the Sengled Element Classic bulbs are not meant to be used outdoors." Since most folks don't think much about the difference between enclosed and non-enclosed fixtures when buying bulbs, this seems like information that should be out front in the product details section of the product page; not buried in a linked document. In fairness, if you search the word "enclose" in the Q&A section, the manufacturer does respond accurately to an inquiry about this type of enclosure. So the second star came off because of the missing details. What I would like to see is more LED manufacturers using some form of "Dimmable via the app ONLY" and "Not suitable for enclosed fixtures" prominently on the product details page.

I tried a couple different brands for smart devices, but Sengled became my go to brand. Their devices easily connect to home assistant and even if they don't advertise it their devices all seem to have power monitoring. For the light bulbs like these, I have not had to use their brightest. I use them in the evenings for some lighting and generally I have them on 1/2 or 9% on the brightness level. At 9% the bulbs use about 1.3-2 watts of power. At full brightness they do use around 9 watts. I never cared for dimming bulbs since I never really used them. With the home automation dimming is simple and works pretty good. I'd like to see dimmer than 9%, but they can't get that dark. Overall, these are the bulbs I keep buying until something can change my mind. --Update 2022-07-13: Well something has started to change my mind... these bulbs do NOT act as a router according to home assistant. I put up around 10 of these bulbs in various places thinking they did. Luckily I had some Innr bulbs and those do act as routers. Also I have noticed there seems to have been a change in the bulbs recently. When ordering sengled bulbs I used to get a nice red and white package and now I get a brown box with black print on it. These brown box bulbs are the same model as the others, but the base design is slightly different and is has been a real pain to pair with home assistant. The good news is that if you turn on/off the bulb 10 times (the last cycle must end in the ON position) eventually it would work. I had to do that reset mode 3 times before one would pair.