Review on Feit Electric Soft White BR30 LED Bulb - HomeKit Compatible by Ginny Gregory

Summary: I bought a couple of bulbs as stock deals for about $12 each, which is an absolutely ridiculous price for Homekit colored smart bulbs. They don't interact well with the Homekit color wheel, but Siri can give them the correct colors on request, and the regular FEIT Electro app colors can do the same. They have a large lag when triggered, turned off, or generally changed. They don't work with any dimmer I can find and they work with a home kit. Despite complaints, they WILL connect. But you have to update them. instructions below. Overall I'm happy with the product for a very low price but I wouldn't pay much more and wouldn't recommend it for the whole house due to latency and lack of integration in terms of physical switches. Light solution at least. To break it down a little further, the simple setup is 2/5: These bulbs plug in. BUT YOU MUST UPDATE IT! Due to the necessary updates, this process is long and cumbersome! I went through several of these bulbs, couldn't connect them to a home kit and almost gave up before contacting Feit Electric. And I'm glad I did, because on the phone he told me that Apple has updated the HomeKit software to iOS 13, the latest version released, and for the bulbs to be able to connect to the new operating system they need to use the app "Feit OTA" to be updated. After upgrading the bulbs which took a long time I had to do each one individually and each had to do 2 upgrades, they work fine with HomeKit and connect right away. and with the greatest ease. Here are the instructions: 1. Turn on only one light bulb. Any you have.2. Download feit ota from App Store3. Open the app 4. Tap "More"5 at the bottom right. Click on the first option "Upgrade GATT Hardware" 6. Click on the lightbulb (since you only activated one, only one should appear).7. Press the big button in the middle that prompts you to update the firmware.8. Make sure your phone's screen stays on, otherwise it may time out. I actually went into the brightness settings on my phone and turned off the auto lock so I didn't have to sit and stare at my phone forever. The update will take some time.9. After this update is complete, close the app and go back to the third step to see if there is another update. Each of my lamps required two upgrades to work with the Home Kit.10. After all updates are completed. It should say "no update required"11. Try connecting to HomeKit. It should connect with no problems. If the connection still fails, try a factory reset using the instruction manual that came with the lamp. This shouldn't delete your update, just roll it back in case something's wrong. After all, you should be connected, cheers! If you have any problems, please contact feit electric. Their support team was very friendly and helpful and helped me fix the problem without error and now my lightbulbs are working. For this reason. Functionality: 3/5 Works as intended, but not without limitations. As I mentioned earlier, the latency is pretty bad. Sometimes 5-6 seconds. Sometimes from 1 to 2. Almost never immediately. It's a drastic drop from the Phillips hue, which has almost no lag, but the lag on these tubes is sometimes so high that it stalls my home kit scenes. This always works, but may take a second. or 6. Get up and go into a dark room, count to six, and then turn on the light. Most people would have been all the way in the room by now. and maybe even get out (ie grab a coat real quick or something?) before the 6 seconds are up. If this delay doesn't work for you, which I think annoys most people, then this won't work for you. Unfortunately I cannot find a dimmer that works with these lamps. There are some Phillips shading options on the wall which is great. We have that for most of our lights at the moment. But if you were hoping to easily dim those lightbulbs, look elsewhere. CURRENTLY. Just because you can't find a dimmer doesn't mean you can't use it with a wall switch. A four button Phillips Hue dimmer will work, you can reprogram the remote through HomeKit to control any HomeKit accessory (what those bulbs are) or a scene (that those bulbs can be programmed to). But I can't find a way to use the dimmer buttons to just dim the bulbs or make them brighter. What you can do is set a dimmer button to control a scene where the bulbs are dimmed to a specific set point (e.g. switch. Additionally, you can also buy a Homekit smart button. I believe Logitech has one called Pop or something. And with that you can turn any Homekit device on or off. But again without dimming of course. They seem to work fine with Phillips tint bulbs (apart from the delay) and when I ask Siri, all bulbs green or red or whatever, both Phillips bulbs and electric bulbs are about the same hue. Colors come. The Apple HomeKit color wheel does a terrible job here. It mostly skips red, but Siri was actually able to to make the bulbs any color you want. Also feit ota app lets you choose colors but their color wheel is almost as useless. Color picker in their app works t good (only a few pre-selected common colors, including red). A final word of caution: they turn white before the final color as they lose and regain power. With Phillips hue bulbs, you can choose which color or scene you want your bulbs to change in the event of a power outage, or you can even choose to just 'stay in state'. I still can't find a way to change this on fake bulbs, it seems like they default last but not without going soft first, which in the event of a power outage in the middle of the night can be a bit nasty be. Luckily we installed these bulbs in one place and not in the bedroom where it doesn't matter. Price 5/5: Indeed, $13 (with stock offers) for a colored bulb for a home set is totally unheard of. Hue bulbs (which are arguably more realistic and easier to set up) are over 3x more expensive than new, and the cheapest Hue bulbs I've seen (stock deal or multipack) were $30 for a bulb. You just can't beat him. I wouldn't recommend paying full price because at $25 it's pretty close to a good deal on Philips Hue bulbs and they're a lot better. Style 5/5: They look the same as a regular LED light bulb. Even more than a Phillips shade. If you're looking for a discreet setup, this is a good option. Customer Service 5/5: Friendly, fast, efficient, knowledgeable, helped me install lightbulbs right away with a home kit. I believe that if I have new problems, they can solve the problem. long-term durability? /5: I'll update my review if I encounter any issues, but so far they've been working fine just a day after installing them. .That's it for now. Overall I am very satisfied for this price range. As I mentioned, they're not very functional for whole house lighting due to the lag and inability to integrate with dimmer switches, but if that doesn't bother you then this can work. It's also cumbersome to set up and you have to update each bulb individually, maybe even multiple times, for it to connect to HomeKit, but when you update, they connect to HomeKit. I want to place and install them in places where I don't even need a light switch, I just put them in a lamp and sideboard that I included in our setup. They never need to be toggled with a switch as they turn off when I don't need them and turn on automatically when I need them. In the end I decided to keep these bulbs and if I can find a few more separate places to put them I'll probably buy more when stock deals become available.