This Innr LED strip review UK tests the FL 250 C, a 5m Zigbee 3.0 RGBW strip that pairs directly to Home Assistant with no bridge, no app account, and no cloud dependency.
- Pairs straight to a Zigbee coordinator, fully local
- Full RGB, colour temperature and on-device colour loop effect
Pros
- No hub, bridge, or manufacturer app required to use it with Home Assistant
- Fully local control over ZHA — nothing leaves the network
- Genuine RGBW: a separate white channel alongside colour, so whites don't look pink or green
- On-device colour loop effect runs without any Home Assistant automation
Cons
- Firmware version reports as "Unknown" in Home Assistant — no way to confirm you're up to date \1\n
- No Apple HomeKit, Hue Entertainment or Hue Secure support, even when paired to a Hue Bridge
| Spec | Innr FL 250 C |
|---|---|
| Connectivity | Zigbee 3.0 — Innr lists Hue Bridge, Home Assistant (ZHA or Zigbee2MQTT), Homey, SmartThings, Google Assistant, Alexa and Echo speakers with a built-in Zigbee hub, plus its own bridge |
| Length | 5m, cuttable |
| Brightness | 2,800 lumens (the shorter 3m FL 230 C is rated 2,200 lumens) |
| Colour range | 16 million colours (RGB) plus a separate white channel, roughly 1,000K–20,000K |
| Power | 24V DC power supply, up to 24W |
| Typical price | Around £56 (€64.99) from European stockists — no mainstream UK listing for the 5m at the time of writing |
Dimming is smooth rather than steppy — Innr rates the dimming range at 1–100%, low enough at the bottom end to work as ambient lighting rather than just a bright accent. Innr’s flex light strips have also been noted to darken much faster than comparable strips as you pull the brightness down, so a small slider movement near the bottom of the range can drop the light more than expected — worth nudging gently rather than dragging. The rated lifespan is over 50,000 hours, in line with most LED strips on the market, so longevity isn't a concern here.
Design and setup
The strip ships on a reel with the driver and Zigbee control unit already attached, plus a UK three-pin power adapter. There's no separate hub or dongle in the box — the small white control module in-line with the strip is the Zigbee radio, not a bridge. That module also carries a physical button, so the strip can be switched on and off by hand without a hub, app or voice assistant involved at all.
Physical installation is the same as any adhesive LED strip: clean the surface, peel the backing, and press it into place, cutting at the marked points if you need a shorter run. Because it's a single 24V run rather than individually addressable segments, you get one uniform colour along the whole strip rather than Govee-style per-segment effects — a trade-off for the simpler, hub-free protocol.
The 24V driver sits inline near the plug end rather than at the strip itself, which keeps the visible cabling to a minimum once it's tucked behind furniture or along a skirting board. At 5m and up to 24W, one strip comfortably covers a run behind a TV unit, along a shelf, or around a room's coving without needing a second controller — something Wi-Fi strips with shorter maximum runs often can't manage in a single length.
Running it at 100% brightness in white draws close to the full 24W, which at the 26.32p/kWh Ofgem price cap unit rate for October 2026 works out to roughly 0.6p an hour — in line with any other LED strip of this length and unremarkable either way. Left on a dim colour loop for ambient lighting, draw drops well below that, since brightness and colour saturation both affect current draw on an RGBW strip like this one.
Does the Innr FL 250 C work with Home Assistant?
Yes — natively, and without any bridge. We paired it to a Home Assistant instance running ZHA on a Texas Instruments CC2652-based Zigbee coordinator, and it joined the network in under a minute with no manual configuration.
Once paired, it shows up as a single light entity with brightness, an RGB colour wheel, and a colour-temperature slider for warm-to-cool white — all three sit behind the tab strip at the bottom of the light's more-info dialog.
Home Assistant also exposes a built-in colour loop effect that runs entirely on the device — pick it from the light's more-info dialog and the strip cycles through colours on its own, with no automation or polling needed on the Home Assistant side.
The device page also exposes proper ZHA configuration entities rather than hiding them behind a manufacturer app: off/on transition time, on-level, power-on behaviour (defaults to turning back on after a power cut), power-on brightness level, and start-up colour temperature. Everything is adjustable from the Home Assistant UI, with no YAML required.
The one rough edge: the device page reports firmware as "Unknown" rather than a version number, so there's no straightforward way to confirm whether you're running the latest release. If you'd rather avoid ZHA's local-only radio setup, the strip is also a listed Zigbee2MQTT device, so both of Home Assistant's major Zigbee integrations are covered — see our Zigbee2MQTT vs ZHA comparison if you're deciding which to run.
Because everything runs through the Zigbee coordinator rather than a manufacturer cloud service, automations built around the strip keep working during an internet outage — turning it on at sunset, syncing it to another light's colour, or triggering the colour loop from a script all continue to fire locally. That's the main practical benefit of the ZHA-first approach over a Wi-Fi strip tied to a vendor's servers.
Who should buy the Innr FL 250 C?
It suits anyone already running a Zigbee coordinator for Home Assistant who wants ambient colour lighting without adding another app or cloud account to the mix. That covers most households that already own an Innr, Hue, or IKEA Zigbee bulb — adding this strip to the same mesh takes minutes and doesn't introduce a second ecosystem to manage. If you want per-segment rainbow effects or music-reactive lighting, Govee's Wi-Fi strips do that better. If you're all-in on Hue and want strip lights that gradient smoothly along their length, Hue's own strip is the more polished (and pricier) choice. And if you don't yet own any Zigbee coordinator or hub at all, factor in the cost of one — around £22 for a SONOFF ZBDongle-E, up to £38 for Home Assistant’s own Connect ZBT-2 — before comparing prices against hub-free Wi-Fi strips.
Verdict
The Innr FL 250 C is an easy recommendation for a Home Assistant household that wants straightforward, local Zigbee colour lighting without hub tax or app clutter — it paired instantly over ZHA, exposed full brightness, colour, and colour-temperature control, and even runs its own colour loop effect without any automation. The lack of per-segment effects and patchy UK stock are the only real caveats; if those don't matter to you, it's a dependable strip that fits straight into an existing Zigbee network.
