Hampton Bay wink remote and a repeater

Hardware
1

I have a Hampton Bay ceiling fan remote that is wink enabled. I’m running HA on a rpi3b+ using the husbzb-1.

I had a hard time getting it paired due to the distance between them. I finally got them paired by temporarily moving the rpi closer to the ceiling fan.

Once paired successfully I moved the rpi back and now the fan shows offline, which I figured would happen because of the distance. So I purchased a samsung plug, the newest model that says it is a zigbee repeater.

I plugged it in near to where I had rpi to get the fan paired. I was able to pair the samsung plug just fine. I’ve restarted HA but I still the fan is offline. It doesn’t seem to want to work through or it doesn’t see the repeater.

Do I need to reset the fan and pair it again? Do these fan controls work through a repeater? I have a wink 2 hub but would rather keep it in HA and avoid the wink hub delay.

2

I have had nothing but problems with mine on wink and with the zha component. It drops offline all of the time. I would try resetting it and pairing again now that you have the plug but not sure it will help.

I just replaced mine last week with a Sonoff ifan02 $18 and flashed it with tosmota

3

Will it pair through a repeater?

I need to look into those spinoff devices. Was flashing them hard?

4

It isn’t ZigBee it is Wifi and runs Tosmota so it integrates with MQTT. Flashing was a bit of a pain, but it was because I am running Linux and couldn’t use the recommended tool to flash.

5

Also had similar experience with multiple of these units. I had 6 of these fans and ALL the controllers had challenges staying connected. Lots of back and forth with Wink and Home Depot was pointless.

I fought with HD to pay to refund the cost of the fans and pay to have them removed/replaced to which the compromise was they refunded the fans and we kept them.

So I rewired them all to use a Caseta dimmer for the lights and a GE fan controller for the fan. I lost reverse and the “breeze” feature with this setup but they work reliably now.

6

Will these Hampton bay controllers pair through a repeater?

7

I’ve come to the conclusion that this Hampton Bay controller cannot be paired through a repeater.

With the repeater in place I put a new smart bulb within the same location as the ceiling fan I was able to pair the new smart bulb and control it through the repeater.

So for now I just put the wink Hub in the same room as the ceiling fan and use it from HA through the wink. There’s only about a one second delay and I can live with that for now.

8

I’m at like an 80% satisfaction rate with mine right now, I can have it up for days but then fight with it a few times in the same day. I like the Sonoff but am not up for flashing it, don’t have all the tools and usually break things when I tinker too much ;/

Originally when I switched the HB from Wink to HA it gave me lots of problems but recently I was running for a month successfully. This was all on a Pi 3 with the Elelabs USB adapter but then I switched to an Asus Tinker Board the same day as the recent ZHA update in 0.84 and it went to being flaky again. I’ve moved the antenna from inside the fan collar at celing to mounted on ceiling outside of collar but sometimes it still disconnects. It’s wild it’s all in the same room maybe all of 10 to 12 feet apart in a wide open space, no walls or anything.

If the HB keeps disappointing I might have to get the GE Z-Wave switch but then would need a light switch too, so much cost to control the one setup especially already owning this unit.

edit: it looks like .85 might include this PR, which fixes a few issues regarding ZHA state on restart or when controlled by a remote. I wonder if it might help keep the HB in line…

9

0.85.0 seems to have an issue with the light entity of the fan module and also prevents my other ZHA lights from being found, I opened an issue for it…

10

Thanks for the FYI. I still have mine connected via my wink hub 2. I did try to upgrade to 85 but got way too many errors for ZHA and Zwave both. Didn’t have time to troubleshoot so I backed up to 84.6 and got it back up and running.

I just thought maybe I should have disabled wink for a moment so the fans wouldn’t show up and see if that fixed the ZHA. I’ll try the upgrade again this weekend if I have more time.

11

I am on 0.88.2 and this still seems to be an issue for me. Was this fix released yet?

12

@cybergrimes Are you still missing the Light entity with this Hampton Bay module?

I’m new to Home Assistant and just added a Hampton Bay wink device to my system but only the fan and switch entities show up but no light.

My Hassio version is 0.90.2 and it looks like the fix mentioned should be included in this version.

Thankd

13

@hammondrm I removed the module in January but there was a fix provided in the issue I opened and it did work for me at the time. Maybe 2nd reply here: https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/issues/19921

14

@cybergrimes Thanks for the quick response. I’ll add a comment to the issue thread as suggested.

15

bumping this as i’m having the same issues. Pairs fine with rpi in room, moved back to normal location and adding a repeater (ikea outlet in same location as rpi was for pairing) and it’s unavailable/offline. Can’t get it to pair through repeater, and letting zigbee mesh rebuild (unplugging rpi for 30+ min and waiting a day for mesh to rebuild) shows no changes.

Is anyone successfully using a repeater with this fan control? Is there any hope for using these controls anywhere except the same room as the rpi?

Related: Is there any better solution out there for remote based fans? My fans are all fan/light/remote units with only one line at the wall. I’d love to switch to zwave or the new lutron fan controls, but those need light/fan loads separated out. The ifan02 is discontinued (and i’m not excited to flash and set up MQTT just for that one use case), Bond just started their API and it’s beta/bare bones (and I’d prefer to not rely on the RF remote reciever). Thoughts?

16

Just ran into same issue but also using Tradfri as extenders. Ordered a peanut smart plug to see if it works since some people in a smartthings device thread said it worked as a repeater for them. Will update tomorrow when it arrives.

17

Peanut hooked up and since my fan was offline for 24 hours a restart and it synced up with the peanut plug and now is able to be controlled. I’ll have to watch it a few days to make sure it doesnt disconnect but so far solid.

18

how’s it looking after a few days? do you have an almond that was used to setup the peanut or is it just plug and play?

19

Rock solid now. Even had a fierce storm that knocked out power and sent only my 2 hampton bays offline. Had to move the hub to reconnect but besides that it’s stayed firmly connected. Peanut plug connected plug and play with my Huzbsb-1. Only issue with them is they show up as a binary sensor but its a known issue. You can fix by editing the zha config though. As far as a repeater goes though its been very solid. @sqweak

20

Not sure if you still running through the wink or not but i found the Peanut Plug repeats the wink remote signal with my Huzbsb-1. Just wanted to share the news. 14 bucks on amazon so not even a bank breaker.