Christmas Haul - C-Life Smart Bulbs With Google Home

I've chronicled my experience with LIFX bulbs before here on the blog.  Here's my post from February of last year showing the bulb and how we were using it.  The LIFX bulbs are great.  They have tons of different colors, plenty of scheduling, integration with Nest and Google Home.  But they're pricey.  Still.  After being on the market for a number of years, they're still about $49.00 per bulb.

These GE C-Life bulbs are cheaper.  Much cheaper.  If you can find them on sale, you can get a pair of them for $15.  $7.50 per bulb is very affordable. 

But with that lower cost comes some trade-offs.   First, there's no color.  They're just normal light bulbs.  Second, it appears that they're running off bluetooth, so they have to be *close* to a Google Home.  Welp, for us, that's not a problem, because we have these Google Homes, Google Home Minis and Google Home what-have-yous in various places around our house.

Here's the bulb below.  Looks like a mostly normal bulb and would be fine in a lot of fixtures that have shades or you can't see the bare bulb in (like...I don't think these would fly in our kitchen island pendants because you see a lot of bulb.

The setup is quite simple with Google Homes.  Just screw the bulb in, fire up the Google Home app.  Tap twice.  And you're on your way.  The bulb shows up in the Google Home app in the room you've set it for like I have one in my home office:

Our home keeps getting smarter.  We now have a few bulbs, a smart Garage Door opener, cameras and even a few smart switches.  A real ecosystem is starting to develop. 

The other 2018 Christmas Haul posts (so far):

• The latest post from my [Haul] was this under-door draft dodger that I'm using for sound proofing.
• A few days back, I posted about the Working Hands Hand Cream in a tube that Nat's Mom gifted me.
• A couple of packages of Frixion Ball erasable Clicker pens
• A teammate gifted me this Pizza soap.
• And another teammate gave me this awesome "I don't KNOW Margo" shirt.  Those of you who know the drill here, know that this shirt, while indeed awesome, has gone into one of the Christmas tubs into storage to be brought back out on November 1st.