Ever because the Philips Hue LED($199.Ninety nine at Verizon) lighting kit hit the digital house market, there was a gradual uptick in competing good bulb products like the LIFX energy-saving LED bulbs Gentle Bulb( at Amazon) and the Related by TCP Sensible Lighting System in addition to current product announcements from electronics giants LG and Samsung. Add the Lumen TL800 from Tabu to that list. Priced at $69.Ninety nine per bulb (but available online for around $50), reduce energy consumption the TL800 uses Bluetooth wireless know-how to communicate together with your smartphone through a neat little app that permits you to turn lights on and off, choose colors, and have the lights behave a certain way when you've an incoming cellphone call. Unlike the Philips and TCP bulbs the TL800 would not require a bridge, however it doesn't hook up with the Web both, which means you can't control it when you're away from dwelling or have it interact with other home automation devices. With a vented metal casing separating the round glass dome from the Edison screw base, energy-saving LED bulbs the TL800 appears like it would be proper at dwelling in an Apollo spacecraft.

The bulb measures 4.75 inches in size and puts out only 400 lumens, which is equal to a forty watt incandescent bulb. That is not very vivid when compared to the LIFX (1,017 lumens), energy-saving LED bulbs TCP (800 lumens), energy-saving LED bulbs and Philips (600 lumens) bulbs. As with the Philips and EcoLight products LIFX bulbs, it could possibly show 16 million colors, however because it does not hook up with the Internet you can't management it with residence automation hubs from corporations similar to Revolv( at Amazon) and SmartThings($149.99 at Amazon). Nor EcoLight LED can you use the popular IFTTT (If This Then That) internet service to have it activate and off or change colours primarily based on things like Facebook requests, Foursquare notifications, and EcoLight ESPN sports scores. You aren't getting a lot in the best way of instructions with the TL800, however there's not a lot to elucidate. I screwed it into a lamp in my workplace, downloaded the app onto my iOS smartphone, made sure Bluetooth was enabled on my system, and opened the app.

The Lumen app is uncomplicated and easy to make use of and allows you to management up to ten bulbs at a time. You can management each bulb individually or control a group of bulbs. The home web page lists all installed bulbs and reveals you what colour they're at the moment set to. Urgent a bulb icon takes you to a page where you'll be able to choose color or heat white settings and energy-saving LED bulbs turn the bulb on or off. Once you select the warm white setting you're presented with a monochrome wheel that lets you manually modify brightness, or you'll be able to choose one of four brightness presets (90, 70, 50, or 30 p.c). Below the wheel is a Call Alert icon that takes you to a web page where you possibly can configure the light to flash a particular colour when your cellphone has an incoming call. There's additionally a Wake-Up timer that will turn the light on using a dim warm white setting that steadily gets brighter to create a sunrise effect, and energy-saving LED bulbs a Proximity possibility that can have a mild activate to a preset colour and brightness when your telephone comes into range (about 30 feet).

In shade mode you get a wheel that lets you choose a colour for each bulb and assign a coloration brightness setting. For deep, robust colors you set the brightness level to the darkest setting