TP-Link Tapo
TP-Link Tapo L530B smart bulb (B22, colour)
- Wi-Fi
Verified September 2026
The cheapest way to make a bayonet fitting smart — under £8 for a full-colour B22 bulb, controlled locally over the LAN by Home Assistant's native TP-Link integration (a Tapo account is only needed for setup). Colour rendering (CRI ≥80) is honest budget RGB — nowhere near Hue's Gamut C for deep reds and blues, and a step behind Innr's >82 CRI, so treat it as mood lighting, not a colour-critical fixture. Rated for 15,000 hours, roughly half Hue's or Innr's 25,000, tracking with the price gap. Best for older UK homes with B22 pendants where E27 rivals don't fit, or anyone wanting a cheap, controllable bulb rather than a lighting centrepiece.
In Home Assistant
| Control | Type | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Light | Light | Primary control entity; supports brightness, HS/RGB colour, and colour temperature. |
| Colour temperature | Number (2500-6500K) | Range reported by the device's own component negotiation; setting outside this range is rejected by the bulb, not just clamped by HA. |
| Effect | Select | Limited to up to 2 unnamed custom dynamic-effect slots synced from the device; does not expose Tapo's named seasonal presets, which are strip-hardware-only. |
| Brightness | Number (0-100%) | Changes apply locally with no cloud round-trip once the bulb is paired. |
| Availability | Attribute | Flips to unavailable on re-authentication failures after certain firmware updates; recovering it currently requires a manual Third-Party Services toggle in the Tapo app rather than an HA-side retry. |
The bulb reports a light-effect component in its device profile, but it's capped at 2 user-defined slots with no name field — Tapo's named preset library (Christmas, Halloween, Aurora and similar) is strip-hardware-only under the hood, so it never surfaces on this bulb's HA effect dropdown despite showing in the Tapo app's own UI. A firmware regression reported repeatedly through mid-2026 is worth flagging: bulbs auto-updated to a newer firmware started failing setup with an encryption-scheme error, and the fix users converged on is toggling Third-Party Services off then back on in the Tapo app, sometimes two or three cycles before HA can re-handshake. Colour temperature is addressable 2500K-6500K alongside full HSV, and because control is local post-setup, brightness/colour changes land with none of the Tapo app's cloud round-trip lag.
Specs
- cri
- ≥80
- power
- 9 W (60 W equivalent)
- fitting
- B22 (bayonet)
- lifespan
- 15,000 hours (manufacturer-rated, 15,000 switch cycles)
- brightness
- 806 lm
- energy rating
- Weighted energy consumption 9 kWh/1000h (EU label; no letter class published)
- dimmable range
- 1%-100%
- colour temperature
- 2500-6500K, plus full RGB colour (16 million colours)