CREE 4Flow Teardown and Review

[brickbat]

Your post would be so much more interesting if you'd add your location to your profile...

 

[idleprocess]

The price online still shows as $8, and I am not sure why they were cheaper in store.

I'm going to guess that website pricing is national. Your utility is certainly not keen to subsidize non-customers, so they are likely to encourage keeping the subsidy as quiet as possible.

 

[FRITZHID]

I've found that there's allot of hd products that you can find on sale, sometimes just in a few stores, but not listed anywhere.
Was nice when my ex wife worked there, had 1st dibs! Lol

 

[James1095]

It's not always obvious when a bulb is subsidized, they just list the final price on them and don't show whatever discount you are getting. As it is there are people who buy up subsidized bulbs and resell them on ebay at inflated prices.

 

[idleprocess]

Necro bumping, but as an original participant I don't feel too bad about it.

Was thinking about the lack of bulbs on the market between 3000K and 4000K (other than Sylvania on the 'zon) then remembered this hack and the fact that I had 4 of these bulbs in a little-used bathroom fixture.

After some experimenting with a utility knife and swivel-jaw pliers I found the best tool to be a putty knife with a ~60° back hook to be the most effective tool. Mercifully, Cree arranged it so the anchored PCB is oriented 90° relative to the seam with the free-floating PCB at 0°. The bulbs don't miraculously just seal up perfectly again, but everything is sufficiently well-retained that I don't feel the need to futz with glue or otherwise re-seal them - the interior spacers/diffusers are retained by the bulb halves. The bulbs are pretty utilitarian and the split subtle from a distance - not a lot of aesthetics to save and a lot of effort for little gain.

Subjectively, it's pretty close to the 4000K fixture I'm sitting under right now - which happens to use a similar trick - mixing 3000K and 5000K LEDs. Looking at the bulbs it's impossible to discern the presence of 2 different CCT packages without looking down the axis and squinting. It could be the faux brass ceiling fan light kit I migrated them to and my longstanding visual memory of the 2700K CFLs that used to be there, but there's a vague sense of pink to it now when looking at the bulbs in the fixture; looking at the light cast they're what I've experienced with my other experiments in 2700K/5000K color-mixing.

Like a great number of cheaper LED bulbs on the market these things do flicker, thus I'm not sure I'd recommend buying any of these just to perform this particular experiment - especially since they only look to be available as NOS.