Zigbee Smart Bulb GU10

A Zigbee smart bulb GU10 is a colour spot made for ceilings full of downlights rather than for a single lamp.

• Why a Zigbee smart bulb GU10 beats a Wi-Fi one
• The gateway is required, and it is not in the box
• Grouping a ceiling
• Fitting them
• Buy the ceiling in one order

Why a Zigbee smart bulb GU10 beats a Wi-Fi one

A downlit ceiling is never one bulb. A kitchen has six, a sitting room eight, a corridor four. Put those on Wi-Fi and every one of them is a device competing for a slot on your router, alongside the phones, the laptops and the television.

A Zigbee smart bulb GU10 takes no router slot at all. Ten of them means one gateway on the network, and every spot repeats the Zigbee signal onward, so the mesh gets stronger with each one fitted rather than more crowded. Downlights are the clearest case in the whole shop for choosing Zigbee.

The gateway is required, and it is not in the box

There is no Wi-Fi radio in this spot. Without a gateway it fits the holder, lights when the wall switch is on, and nothing more.

We stock the Zigbee Tuya Gateway, and the HomeKit Zigbee gateway for a household on iPhones who want the ceiling in Apple Home and answering to Siri.

Grouping a ceiling

Group the spots in the app and the whole ceiling changes together: one tap, or one voice command through Alexa or Google Assistant working via the gateway.

16 million colours and tunable white from 2700K to 6500K. In practice the white range does the daily work, taking a kitchen from cool working light to warm evening light, and colour gets used on a display shelf or a bar.

Fitting them

GU10 is the two-pin push-and-twist spot: push it up into the holder and turn a quarter turn. It replaces an existing GU10 one for one with no wiring.

If the fitting screws in rather than twisting, that is E27 and you want the Zigbee E27 bulb instead.

Buy the ceiling in one order

Wattage and lumen figures vary between production batches on this spot, so we will read the label on the stock we hold rather than publish a figure that may not match.

This matters more on downlights than anywhere else, because a ceiling of spots at slightly different outputs shows. Order the whole ceiling together from one batch, and tell us if you are matching against spots already fitted. If you only want one or two smart spots rather than a ceiling, the Wi-Fi version saves you buying a gateway. The app all of these run on is documented at tuya.com.