Why You Can Trust CNET Feit Electric HomeBrite Bluetooth Smart LED System review: Feit's bright idea: Better Bluetooth bulbs
With decent features and a good variety of bulb shapes, there's a lot to like about Feit's HomeBrite LEDs.
- 10 years product testing experience with the CNET Home team
Hubs. Who needs 'em?
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
Not Feit, that's for sure. Last year, the manufacturer gave me an early look at its line of HomeBrite-branded smart LEDs that use a Bluetooth mesh network to sync up with your phone and with each other. That means you don't need a control hub plugged into your router in order to control the things.
The obvious limitation with Bluetooth bulbs is that you need to be within Bluetooth range (about 50 feet) in order to interact with the lights on your Android or iOS device. With some Bluetooth bulbs I've tested -- most notably, the C by GE Life and Sleep LEDs -- that also means that prescheduled lighting changes won't work when you aren't in range.
Fortunately, that isn't the case with Feit's bulbs. They're smart enough to remember your schedules even when you aren't home, and if you've got multiple bulbs, they'll stay synced while you're away, constantly pinging and re-pinging each other to help keep track of your settings.
Couple that with the fact that HomeBrite's lineup includes bulbs that don't commonly come with built-in radios (a candelabra LED and an outdoor-rated PAR38 floodlight, for instance), and you'll start to see the appeal of these lights. With HomeBrite's baseline bulbs selling for a relatively low $15 each, I think they might make sense for anyone looking for simple lighting smarts in a fixture or two. However, a lack of compatibility with third-party systems along with glitchy, imperfect performance in my tests has me stopping short of recommending them outright.
The BR30-, B10-, A-, and PAR38-shaped HomeBrite LEDs.
Basic specs
The HomeBrite lineup consists of five options:
- A common A-shaped bulb for $15
- A B10-shaped candelabra bulb for $19
- A BR30-shaped floodlight for $20
- A weather-rated PAR38-shaped outdoor floodlight for $30
- A recessed fixture retrofit kit for $35
I tested each one out in our lighting lab, where we use a spectrometer and an integrating sphere to measure things like brightness, color temperature, and the way heat build-up affects each bulb's performance.
The HomeBrite bulbs were a bit dim for my tastes, with the A-shaped bulb coming in at 672 lumens, well below the 800 or so that you'd expect from a common 60W incandescent. The candelabra bulb was on the dim side, too, with 277 lumens to its name -- slightly below average in the candelabra class, at least among 40W replacements.
The bulbs did an impressive job with heat management, though. All LEDs will see slight performance dips in the first hour or so of use as the bulbs heat up. Each of the HomeBrite bulbs saw less of a dip than average, with none of them ever dipping below 90 percent of their initial brightness. That's a very good result, and one that speaks well to Feit's hardware.
The HomeBrite candelabra LED looks huge when you compare it with the sort of incandescent it aims to replace.
I also liked the clean, simple designs of each of the bulbs -- at least for the most part. Even by LED standards, that decorative candelabra bulb is fairly enormous.
App controls
This brings us to the HomeBrite app, which features a clean, simple design in its own right. Whenever you open it, it'll scan for your mesh network. If your bulbs are powered and in Bluetooth range, you'll be able to turn them on or off, dim them up and down, schedule them, group them or set a quick timer until they turn off or on.
As far as scheduling goes, that's about as comprehensive as Bluetooth bulb controls get. The only thing that's really missing is full RGB color control, as well as tunable color temperatures along the white light spectrum, which you'll find with the similarly priced C by GE Sleep LED, another Bluetooth option.
The HomeBrite app is clean and intuitive, but it's also a bit sluggish and uncomfortable to use.
Using the HomeBrite app is fairly intuitive. You'll swipe from side to side to swap between bulbs or groups of bulbs, then turn bulbs on or off with a tap. Adjusting the brightness is a bit finicky, though -- you have to rotate your finger along a thin radial wheel in a movement that's awfully similar to those side-to-side swipes that switch to a different bulb. I can't tell you how many times I tried to adjust a bulb's brightness during my tests only to accidentally swipe over to the next bulb. I never got the hang of it, and I'm not sure that I ever would.
I also don't like that the app wasn't accurate with the status of my bulbs. I'd leave a bulb on and then find it listed as "off" in the app. Not terribly helpful.
The app is also sluggish at times. Whenever you tweak a setting or adjust a schedule, it'll take at least several seconds to sync everything up with your bulbs. If you plan on doing a lot of scheduling, plan on waiting on a lot of spinning wheels. Fortunately, simple on/off and dimming controls are perfectly snappy.
Something else to consider on the smarts side of things is third-party compatibility. As of right now, there really isn't any of it to speak of with these smart bulbs -- no HomeKit, no Alexa, no Nest, no SmartThings, no IFTTT.
What that means is that you won't be able to turn the bulbs on and off with voice commands, or trigger them with motion detectors, or sync them up with a smart hub so you can control them from beyond Bluetooth range -- or any number of other things that third-party compatibility would bring into the picture. HomeBrite is a pretty solid little system, but it's also a walled-off one that won't play nice with any other smart home gadgets you might own. That, more than anything, feels like the limiting factor here.
The verdict
For a quick smart lighting fix, Feit's bulbs would work well -- especially for tricky spots like chandeliers, sconces, and outdoor fixtures, where your smart bulb options are limited. Credit to HomeBrite for covering the bases and offering the widest variety of smart bulb shapes on the market.
That said, if you're looking for smart lights that'll fit into a larger connected home setup, then the HomeBrite bulbs likely aren't the lights for you. They don't play well (or at all) with other smart home gadgets, nor will they work with the kinds of smart-home platforms that would let you control the lights from outside of Bluetooth range. For anything more than basic control and automation, Feit's bulbs fall short.