GE Cync Reveal Sensible LED Undercabinet Bar Mild overview: Excellent activity lighting

I’m not prepared to rework my (very) small galley kitchen, however my household desperately wanted more room for storing among the bowls, cups, and glasses we use day by day. The least costly answer I might consider was to put in a floating shelf on the one empty wall. Downside solved, but in addition, downside created: The ten-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 Sensible LED Undercabinet Bar Mild. These under-cabinet lights could be hardwired to your house’s electrical system or plugged into an ordinary AC outlet. And in case your cupboards don’t go all the way in which to the ceiling, you could possibly additionally mount them on high 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’ll be able to 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.

The lights are exceedingly simple to bodily set up, due to captive self-tapping screws you could 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 while you go to screw within the gentle itself.

As I’ve already talked about, you possibly can wire the lights to your house’s electrical system or use the supplied cable with a 3-prong plug at one finish to energy the lights. In the event 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. Professional tip: Utilizing a cable chase to cover the surplus electrical wire seems loads higher than simply letting it dangle.

Michael Brown/Foundry

Every 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 colour temperature. Particular stub cables are supplied for daisy-chaining the lights—once more, as much as 10—after which both set of buttons will management each lights.

Specs

As soon as the lights are arrange, you possibly can management them individually or configure multiples to function in sync. They are often managed by way of Bluetooth or Wi-Fi (2.4GHz networks solely), with the latter technique being the most effective method to take if you wish to use Alexa or Google Assistant voice instructions to manage them.

The lights are additionally Apple Residence suitable, however solely by way of Matter over Wi-Fi (there’s no Thread assist), and including them to your Wi-Fi community in that style prevents you from utilizing the Cync app to program and management the lights. You can also make many—however definitely not all—settings modifications and schedules utilizing the Apple Residence app, however you received’t have full management over them when you go that route. You additionally received’t have the ability to entry any of the lighting results that the GE app affords. My dwelling revolves principally 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 7,000K). You can even set them to make use of GE’s personal Reveal HD+ setting, which guarantees white gentle with larger distinction. I prefer it.

The 18-inch gentle bar examined right here produces as much as 1,150 lumens of white gentle at a colour temperature of three,000K, however observe 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).

Mild 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 HomeKit route that may deny you entry to it. Otherwise you would possibly resolve that these lights are simply not the correct answer on your dwelling when you’re striving for a homogenous good dwelling.

In any occasion, going far past the same old colour wheel for choosing colours from a palette of 16 million shades, you can even select from 9 white colour temperature presets: Daylight, Early Morning, Candle Mild, and many others.

There are additionally 34 “gentle reveals” that contain not simply colours but in addition animations. The app divides these between 10 presets and 24 different classes below the heading Discover. Every preset is labeled with an evocative identify, comparable to Candle, Rainbow, Fireworks, and Aurora.

Michael Brown/Foundry

Tapping a preset modifications the lightbars’ habits instantly, whereas the 24 Discover selections should 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 based mostly on 9 impact sorts: Wave, Flicker, Fill, Pop, Alternating, Erratic, Rhythm, Pulse, and Static.

Every customized gentle present has adjustable parameters for colour palette (with an possibility for random modifications), brightness, fade and colour length (every on a scale of 0.1 to five seconds). These customized reveals could be saved with names and known as up later or scheduled.

Lighting schedules

It wouldn’t be a sensible gentle when you couldn’t schedule it to activate and off, so after all you need to use 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 overview is a part of TechHive’s in-depth protection of the most effective good lighting.

The scheduling part of the app additionally allows 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 one among your personal—that may affect the illumination the sunshine bars produce. Truthfully, this function looks as if an afterthought, and it’s not one which I see myself utilizing frequently.

Michael Brown/Foundry

Must you purchase GE Cync Reveal Sensible LED Undercabinet Bar Lights?

Except you’re set on controlling all the things with Matter and/or the Apple Residence—otherwise you don’t thoughts giving up the consequences out there within the app—these GE Cync Reveal Sensible LED Undercabinet Bar Lights are a superb answer for good activity lighting in a kitchen or different workspace that has cupboards or cabinets mounted over counters.

The sunshine bars are very simple to put in and configure within the app, which affords a seemingly infinite variety of lighting colours, routines, and choices. They produce high-quality activity lighting while you’re cooking, working, or crafting; and their lighting scenes are nice for entertaining or simply enjoyable.