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How Sengled made a smart lightbulb with zero carbon footprint

By Erika Rawes Updated June 15, 2022

sengled element lightbulb zero carbon footprint led

Last month, Sengled showcased its new Element lightbulb at CES 2017 in a model connected home display at Sands Expo. The Element bulb is the world’s first carbon-neutral lightbulb, according to the company.

It’s not actually the bulb itself that’s carbon-neutral, but the company’s “One Bulb One Tree” campaign. The Element bulb is so efficient, it produces less carbon than a tree absorbs, and Sengled plants a tree for every lightbulb customers buy. Because each tree can absorb the carbon each lightbulb produces, the bulb effectively has zero carbon footprint.

The Element uses 80 percent less energy than a traditional incandescent bulb, and is rated to last for 22 years. The lightbulb offers the equivalent of a 60-watt bulb, but it only uses 9.8 watts.

In addition to its efficiency, Sengled’s new lightbulb can be integrated into your existing sockets, and it has some cool features like customizable scheduling, color temperature tuning (soft white 2700K to daylight 6500K), and energy tracking. You can control Element bulbs individually or as a group, and you can schedule your lights to turn on and off based on your schedule using the Android/iOS app or through a smart-home ecosystem. The app also shows you how much energy the bulb uses, so you can keep track.

For

around $60

, you can buy a starter kit, which includes two element bulbs and a hub that allows for connectivity. The bulbs also work with Xfinity Home from Comcast, AT&T Digital Life, Samsung SmartThings, Stringify, and Amazon’s Alexa.

The Element is one of the few Sengled bulbs that doesn’t double up on abilities; the Pulse acts as a speaker, the Snap has security features, and the Boost acts as a Wi-Fi repeater.

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Smart Home Evergreen Coordinator

Erika became a professional writer in 2010, and her work is published all over the web on sites ranging from USA Today to…

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Your Christmas tree might be bright, but here’s how to make it smart

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There’s nothing like a Christmas tree decorated with lights and ornaments to get you and your loved ones in the Christmas spirit. One of the more annoying things about Christmas trees, however, is having to continuously plug and unplug those beautiful lights when you come home, leave the house, or turn in for the night.

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How long does smart lighting last?

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When you're spending a healthy chunk of change on a smart lighting system, you want to know that it will last. We're here to break down expected timelines for a smart lighting system and figure out which components are likely to fail first.
How long do smart lights last?
Smart lights use LEDs, which reports show last much, much longer than incandescent bulbs. LEDs can last 30,000 to 50,000 hours of output until brightness decreases to 70% of what it initially had. Meanwhile, CFL bulbs will go for 8,000 to 10,000 hours, while traditional incandescent lamps only last 1,000 hours. Applying a little math shows that you could run an LED bulb eight hours a day for 17 years, and even then, you'd only be dealing with a slight diminishment of bulb brightness. If you're really concerned about making sure your smart lights last long enough, you can always set a schedule so they're only on exactly when they need to be.
Do smart bulbs burn out?
LEDs will emit less light over time. Rather than burn out from overuse, it's much more likely that they'll become unusable due to a wiring fault or gradual decline in color quality before then.

The reason LEDs last so much longer than incandescent bulbs is because they don't rely on generating heat in order to create light. Incandescent bulbs send their voltage through a filament that gets hot until it starts emitting light as well, but over 90% of that energy is lost as heat. So there's a lot less stress on the materials at play in an LED, but it doesn't mean they produce no heat at all. Improper materials that don't account for the small amount of heat they do produce could result in a burnout. In that vein, LEDs that have been built with poor heat sinks are likely to burn out. Home wiring that's running at too high of a voltage could equally fry a smart light bulb. There are outliers, however, and in general, you shouldn't expect your smart lights to burn out in the same way as incandescent bulbs.
Do smart bulbs last longer than regular bulbs?
Smart bulbs do last longer than non-LED bulbs. One potential pitfall with smart lights versus "dumb" LED lights is software support. For example, Philips Hue light bulbs require a wireless hub to communicate with your phone. After a while, the mobile app stopped supporting voice commands to any Hue bulbs that were connected to the first-generation hub, requiring users to upgrade to the next generation. In these instances, the smart light bulbs themselves worked just fine, but the software backbone they needed had partially failed. Basic functions were still supported, but it should be expected that smart lights will lose some of their functions as software platforms evolve.
Do smart bulbs go bad?
At worst, smart bulbs become less useful over time. Diminishing light quality is likely to happen with any LED bulb, and it's unlikely manufacturers will provide software support for any given product for an indefinite amount of time.