This has multiple questions. I see that one of the device drivers for Yeelight bulbs is a RGBW. When I look on Amazon all I see are RGB.
Q1: Is the Yeelight YLDP04YL in Amazon a RGBW bulb? Even though they say in the title it is RGB the specs say it is also an adjustable white with color. Is this the bulb people are using with the RGBW driver?
Q2: Which bulbs are everyone using in their system by way of performance and cost?
Q3: Does anyone use the Sengled color/white bulbs?
thanks for any input
My understanding is that Yeelight bulbs, which I have never used, are Wi-Fi. If this is true and each bulb creates its own Wi-Fi connection to your router/AP, I'd probably only use that if I didn't have many bulbs (otherwise in my house that would be a lot of Wi-Fi clients). Most other smart bulbs, e.g., Hue, Sengled Cree, Trådfri, and others, use ZigBee (with one bridge/gateway-type device connected to your LAN).
Hubitat, of course, can also speak ZigBee, so they can be connected directly to the hub, but if you have other ZigBee devices on your network, many bulbs are reported to be poor "repeaters" (ZigBee forms a mesh network that other ZigBee devices can route through instead of communicating directly to the hub). This means some commands and status reports may be dropped, creating problems for those other devices. Sengled seems to work around this problem by just not repeating at all. Most people work around this problem by using something like the Hue bridge, where all the bulbs are on the separate Hue network and Hubitat communicates to the bridge over the LAN. A few people here have been experimenting with an separate Hubitat hub dedicated entirely to ZigBee bulbs (or I guess you could just use one hub if you don't have any other ZigBee devices) and linking the two hubs with built-in Hubitat apps designed for this purpose.
To get back to your questions:
- I'm not familiar with that exact bulb, but reviews suggest it can also do shades of white (the top review right now suggest you can choose "white" and get a color-temperature slider).
- I'm using mostly Hue bulbs, but that's because I started with Hue (and have a few non-Hue bulbs on that network: Cree and Trådfri, which I'll warn you don't get exposed to HomeKit and can't use new Hue features like default power-on state, if those are of concern to you). There are definitely cheaper options, and it depends on whether you want them directly on Hubitat or a separate network (in any of the ways described above). There are a lot of options, and it depends on what you want and are willing to pay for. In my case, the bulbs are accessible to Hubitat via Hubitat's native Hue integration and my Hue Bridge. Hue bulbs can be connected directly to Hubitat, but I would not recommend that--besides the above problems, you may also have a hard time "resetting" (most ZigBee bulbs have some procedure for this, but probably need a ZigBee remote like the Lutron Connected for this on Hue).
- I haven't used Sengled bulbs, but I have seen them mentioned a lot here, and they're definitely one I'd recommend if you plan on connecting them directly to Hubitat since they aren't on a "known bad repeater" list. (They do make their own "hub," but unlike the Hue Bridge, I don't think there is a Hubitat integration for that, so--like with most other smart bulbs--you do have to connect them directly.)
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Thanks. Lots of info I can use. Some bulbs I guess you just have to try and see. I have Hue and Osram color and the white Sengleds but no color yet. The Yeelights white adj. seem to be real good outside even at a distance. I need to try the Yeelight color.
I have 7 Sengled Element Color Plus (A19) bulbs directly paired to Hubitat. I also have a few Iris 3210-L Zigbee outlets which act as repeaters. I have had zero issues with these bulbs. They simply work. I have never used Hue bulbs, so I cannot compare the color or brightness between the two. For me, the price difference was enough for me to go with Sengled. Also, I like the fact that they are not zigbee repeaters. This way, if someone turns the power off to them, my Zigbee mesh network is not impacted whatsoever.
I have 3 of the Yeelight RGB bulbs and they're great. Fast response time. Wide color temperature range, and the RGB colors are very good. And they're very inexpensive. No complaints.
Thanks for the reply. I like the Sengled bulbs too. I have the adj white ones and they are quite bright with the clear lens. I am going to try the color ones. Not being repeaters sometimes can be good.
You have the RGB only or the RGBW's? I am wondering which model you have. The reason I ask is because the 2 drivers to choose from are a CT and a RGBW. So I assume the RGBW driver will work fine for the RGB.
I believe all the RGB bulbs also do Color Temperature. So yeah, they should technically say RGBW. This is the case with most color bulbs. I don't know of any recent brand of color bulbs that doesn't also do white.
I was thinking that too. The one I am looking at is the YLDP04YL at Amazon. Is this the one you have?
I have 14 of this:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B077GCYCT7/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_qgnuCbQZB2GTA
They work great, they are rgb+w
Sengled I have 6, they work great too.
Yes, silver bottom is v1, white bottom is v2.
Here's a good comparison:
Here they are, finally! The 2nd generation of Yeelight bulbs! Yeelight
Ok, the 2nd gen for these bulbs is the YLDP04YL which is color and now I need to find out what the difference is for the YLDP05YL and YLDP06YL which show are both the adj whites.
If you going to spend $30 on a Yeelight v2 you should buy Sengled, cheaper and they do the same. Between Yeelight v1 and v2 the difference is 200 lumens, one is gray and the other is white and $10 in price.
Sort of: I got the Yeelight Color because the color temperature goes down to 1700K, lower than the Sengled's 2000K. Color Temperature is a rather big element in this house, significantly moreso than actual color.
Strangely, the Yeelight Adjustable White only has a range of 2700-6500, which makes Zero sense to me. Why make the CT-only version have a narrower range than the RGBW version? Both Hue and LIFX also split their color vs CT bulbs in this inexplicable way.
I was looking at prices but the reason I like Yeelight's is they are WIFI versus Zigbee for Sengled. I have 4 Yeelight's outside on the garage lights and they just keep on going even when the temp is really low. The Sengleds are OK when they are inside as well.
No experience with the Yeelights, but you've got plenty of feedback on those. For Zigbee the Sengled are great, because they don't try to repeat the signal (a task best left to outlets and other line voltage powered Zigbee devices with that capability). I have Sengled Element Plus bulbs, and while I like their unusual capabilities to work with a standard dimmer, and yet still operate via Zigbee, it makes for some strange behavior at times.
Hue are great color bulbs, because their color gamut is large, but they're not too expensive and go on sale frequently. IKEA Trådfri are decent and there are very affordable color bulbs available, but just for fun color, not accurate color. IKEA Trådfri and Hue are both bulbs that will try to repeat Zigbee signals, and will do a lousy job of it, causing devices to drop from the network when they fail to repeat properly. I have both of those Zigbee bulb types, but paired to a Hue Bridge and controlled with the Hue Integration. The Sengled are the only bulbs I have paired with the HE hub.
There is still a limitation as far as I'm aware, that IKEA Trådfri color bulbs are not color changeable via the Hue Integration or via direct paring. They work via CIE XY color space and the current HE drivers don't support that yet. So I change color via the Hue app. I do have a lamp that I use as color accent with a Trådfri bulb. I want it to have a random color every day, so I use Google Assistant relay to silently, and tell the Hue bridge to randomly set the lamp to one of several colors each day at sunset.
I see, I got my 14 v1 in $15 each, good luck
Color bulb uses its color LED and white LED to do 1700k
White bulb only has 2 different types of white LED to create the 2700-6500k
Hope it makes sense to you, I'm not good explaining.
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Ahhhhh yeah that makes sense. Takes a bit of extra oomph from an RGB LED to get the lower & higher kelvins.
Exactly, specially for the lower Kelvin
