I had serious kitchen lighting woes. These beautiful LED light bars solved them

Price When Reviewed

$64.99 (18-inch mannequin reviewed. Also out there in a 12-inch width for $59.99 and a 24-inch width for $69.99)

Best Prices Today: GE Cync Reveal Smart LED Undercabinet Bar Light (18-inch)

$45.99

$45.99

I’m not prepared to rework my (very) small galley kitchen, however my household desperately wanted more room for storing a few of the bowls, cups, and glasses we use each day. The least costly answer I may consider was to put in a floating shelf on the one empty wall. Problem solved, but additionally, downside created: The 10-inch-deep shelf forged an objectional shadow on the counter beneath.

Given the small quantity of counter area in our kitchen, we make the most of each sq. inch for meals preparation. I wanted these shadows to be gone. Enter the GE Cync Reveal Smart LED Undercabinet Bar Light. These under-cabinet lights may be hardwired to your private home’s electrical system or plugged into a normal AC outlet. And in case your cupboards don’t go all the best way to the ceiling, you possibly can additionally mount them on prime to forged gentle up the wall and onto the ceiling.

The lights are available white enclosures rated for set up in damp areas. They measure 4.8 inches deep, 1.8 inches thick, and can be found in three widths: 12-, 18-, or 24 inches. You can daisy-chain as much as 10 of them. I went the plug-in route and mounted two of the 18-inch fashions below my floating shelf. Voilà! No extra shadows.

Michael Brown/Foundry

The lights are exceedingly straightforward to bodily set up, due to captive self-tapping screws that you would be able to drill into the underside of your cupboard or shelf with only a screwdriver. This neatly avoids the necessity to pre-drill pilot holes that inevitably find yourself being only a bit off if you go to screw within the gentle itself.

As I’ve already talked about, you possibly can wire the lights to your private home’s electrical system or use the offered cable with a 3-prong plug at one finish to energy the lights. If you go the plug-in route, the wire emerges from the underside of the plug at a rightward angle, permitting you to plug it into both the highest or backside of a duplex outlet, even when the outlet is occupied. Pro tip: Using a cable chase to cover the surplus electrical wire appears quite a bit higher than simply letting it dangle.

Michael Brown/Foundry

Each bar has one button for toggling the lights on and off (or you possibly can dim the LEDs by holding this button down) and a second one for altering the colour or coloration temperature. Special stub cables are offered for daisy-chaining the lights—once more, as much as 10—after which both set of buttons will management each lights.

Specifications

Once the lights are arrange, you possibly can management them individually or configure multiples to function in sync. They may be managed through Bluetooth or Wi-Fi (2.4GHz networks solely), with the latter technique being the very best method to take if you wish to use Alexa or Google Assistant voice instructions to manage them.

The lights are additionally Apple Home appropriate, however solely through Matter over Wi-Fi (there’s no Thread assist), and including them to your Wi-Fi community in that trend prevents you from utilizing the Cync app to program and management the lights. You could make many—however actually not all—settings modifications and schedules utilizing the Apple Home app, however you gained’t have full management over them should you go that route. You additionally gained’t be capable to entry any of the lighting results that the GE app gives. My dwelling revolves largely round Alexa, so I didn’t enroll the lights in Matter.

Michael Brown/Foundry

The LED gentle bars can produce coloured gentle from a palette of 16 million colours, or you possibly can select a tunable white gentle (starting from a really heat 2,000 Kelvin to a cool 7,000Ok). You also can set them to make use of GE’s personal Reveal HD+ setting, which guarantees white gentle with greater distinction. I prefer it.

The 18-inch gentle bar examined right here produces as much as 1,150 lumens of white gentle at a coloration temperature of 3,000Ok, however notice that utilizing the Reveal setting reduces the bar’s most brightness to 900 lumens. The 12-inch gentle bar delivers as much as 750 lumens (630 with Reveal), whereas the 24-inch mannequin delivers 1,500 lumens (1,200 with Reveal).

Light reveals

Michael Brown/Foundry

The Cync app is so wealthy with options that you just’ll need to assume twice about going the Matter and/or Apple HomeEquipment route that may deny you entry to it. Or you may determine that these lights are simply not the suitable answer to your dwelling should you’re striving for a homogenous sensible dwelling.

In any occasion, going far past the same old coloration wheel for selecting colours from a palette of 16 million shades, you may as well select from 9 white coloration temperature presets: Sunlight, Early Morning, Candle Light, and so on.

There are additionally 34 “light shows” that contain not simply colours but additionally animations. The app divides these between 10 presets and 24 different classes below the heading Explore. Each preset is labeled with an evocative title, akin to Candle, Rainbow, Fireworks, and Aurora.

Michael Brown/Foundry

Tapping a preset modifications the lightbars’ habits instantly, whereas the 24 Explore selections have to be previewed earlier than they are often despatched to the lightbars. If that isn’t sufficient choices for you, you possibly can create customized gentle reveals primarily based on 9 impact varieties: Wave, Flicker, Fill, Pop, Alternating, Erratic, Rhythm, Pulse, and Static.

Each customized gentle present has adjustable parameters for coloration palette (with an possibility for random modifications), brightness, fade and coloration period (every on a scale of 0.1 to 5 seconds). These customized reveals may be saved with names and known as up later or scheduled.

Lighting schedules

It wouldn’t be a sensible gentle should you couldn’t schedule it to activate and off, so after all you should utilize the Routines part of the app to program the lights to activate and off, both at outlined instances or on a dawn/sundown (or sundown/dawn) schedule (with padding earlier than or after these occasions).

This assessment is a part of TechHive’s in-depth protection of the best smart lighting.

The scheduling part of the app additionally permits you to create lighting scenes, that are curiously distinct from the sunshine reveals I’ve already talked about. Scenes provide the possibility of selecting a photograph—or importing certainly one of your personal—that may affect the illumination the sunshine bars produce. Honestly, this characteristic looks as if an afterthought, and it’s not one which I see myself utilizing regularly.

Michael Brown/Foundry

Should you purchase GE Cync Reveal Smart LED Undercabinet Bar Lights?

Unless you’re set on controlling every part with Matter and/or the Apple Home—otherwise you don’t thoughts giving up the results out there within the app—these GE Cync Reveal Smart LED Undercabinet Bar Lights are a superb answer for sensible activity lighting in a kitchen or different workspace that has cupboards or cabinets mounted over counters.

The gentle bars are very straightforward to put in and configure within the app, which gives a seemingly limitless variety of lighting colours, routines, and choices. They produce high-quality activity lighting if you’re cooking, working, or crafting; and their lighting scenes are nice for entertaining or simply stress-free.