Elgato Avea Flare Review: Stunning Portable Mood Light

The Elgato Avea Flare is a portable, dynamic mood light that you can take to any room in your house, to your backyard or even camping.

Unlike special lightbulbs that you need to connect to a hub or leave in a single room, the Elgato Avea Flare is a portable mood light with a battery and a plethora of options that you can choose from to customize the look and match your mood or activity.

After using the Elgato Avea Flare for over a month it’s quickly become one of our favorite accessories to use while gaming or while relaxing. The Avea Flare is $99.95 and works with iPhone or Android.

The most common place you’ll find the Elgato Avea Flare in our house is in the game room. With an 8 hour battery and wireless charging base that’s not the only place I use it.

The charger sits in my office where I like to use this to add to the lighting when working at night. I can also carry it to the living room, the bedroom or out to the hot tub since it doesn’t need a cord or WiFi to work.

I’ve been using a custom scene of Hue lights for over a year. I continue to use them alongside the Elgato Avea Flare in the basement, but the Flare offers more flexibility.

Normally I set the Avea Flare off to the right of the TV in a corner or on the floor in another corner and set it to a red/orange scene like Magic Hour or Cozy Flames. Both of these fit in well with an overall dark room for gaming or watching a TV show.

The light flickers and changes colors subtly on all settings, and the Cozy Flames scene looks nice and flickers like a fire would.

With the Elgato Avea app on iPhone or Android you can connect to the light with Bluetooth to choose the scene you want and to control the brightness and vividness of that scene. The app remembers your settings for each scene for the next time you turn it on.

While playing Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 I would normally use the Magic Hour option to fill in the area near the TV with a soft glow. While beating Uncharted 4 and exploring the sea and ruins I switched over to the Mountain Breeze and Northern Glow options that are a little brighter with blue and green hues. In addition to the various scenes, you can choose a solid color.

The brightness, intensity and colors are all very good, delivering enough lighting to the setting to make things pop while not blinding us.

There is also a wake up alarm that can slowly turn on the Flare to simulate a sunrise and connect it to various alarm sounds. I tried this out, but it doesn’t fit my morning routine well. Normally a dog wakes me up before the light has a chance to turn on or my wife is getting up ahead of me.

The function works well, but to use it you will need to have more control of your mornings. I wound up using the Elgato Avea Flare as a portable mood light in the evening instead of as a way to wake up.

Users need an iPhone 4s or later, Apple Watch or Galaxy S4 /Note 2 or later to use the app to control the Flare. The bulb is water-resistant and there is a carry handle on the base that can double as a way to hang the flare.

If you want an easy and awesome way to take dynamic lighting with you, the Elgato Avea Flare is an excellent choice. The Philips Hue Go is $20 cheaper but only offers up to three hours of battery life, compared to eight from the Flare.

Shoppers can buy the Elgato Avea Flare portable mood light from Amazon or direct from Elgato.