I have a house full of BAF (Big Ass Fans) ceiling fans, in the their app they show speeds 1-7. In HA these speeds are represented in percentages. Is there a way to have HA show the speeds 1-7? It would make Google Voice commands a lot easier, cause who remembers 57% as opposed to speed 4.
I fought this battle a few years ago and was summarily dismissed. you should be able to do a search for “fan” “speed” using my username to see the discussions.
So, no, there is no way that I know of to use voice controls using speeds instead of percentages.
2 Likes
That’s disappointing. I recently discovered my smart switches can be made to ‘show as’ a light, fan, valve etc… why can’t they add a similar ‘show as’ feature for fan speeds? DNS wouldn’t be a thing and we’d all have to remember IP addresses if we took the HA approach.
it’s actually double disappointing since as they were phasing out named speeds in favor of percentages they had both the percentages and named speeds peacefully coexisting in the system for around 6 -9 months.
in that time they could have done nothing and just simply left them both in there and it would have been the best of both worlds but instead they put in extra effort to intentionally reduce functionality for named speeds.
Yeah, that’s just daft.
Did this Template work for you? I have added code to my configuration.yaml and restarted but i see no new entity?
When HA used named fan speeds, the only options were “low”, “med” and “high”. So I’m curious how the previous implementation would have been better? You could not operate all 7 speeds if that were the case.
I’m also curious, how would you name all the 7-speeds? Not really a standard is there.
Lastly, when you say “Google Voice” (which is a phone service), do you mean Google Assistant? Isn’t Google Assistant itself limited in this regards? I’m not an expert in this area, but looking at the source code, it would seem Google Assistant is limited to 5 speeds at most, but you would be able to set the speed by either name or number. Again though, I’m not familiar with voice assistants, so maybe that is wrong.
If you are using the Big Ass Fans integration, it provides 7 speed steps. You might be able to say “set fan to speed 4”, but I"m not sure if the 5-speed limitation is in play. You can also tell it to increase or decrease the speed and it will go adjust the speed number up or down.
It seems to me the move to percentage based fans helps in this use case, at least you are able to set any speed, vs. being restricted to low/med/high.
I read the linked topic and it mentions that Alexa understands preset_modes.
Simply template each preset_mode to a corresponding speed. I did this recently when I automated my IR-controllable range fan. Here’s its Template Fan configuration.
1 Like
Thanks for the info. Looking at the BAF integration the only Preset mode is Auto 
Same issue as in I want speed settings not a percent…maybe a scene for each low/med/high might do the trick
One possibility could be to allow an alternate naming convention to percentages. When exposing entities to Google you can apply Aliases so multiple commands are possible. Surely an alternative methodology could be applied to fans!