I’m starting my home automation project and at this point I reached the following scenario for the bedroom:
Currently I have:
Ceiling fan with lamp, which is controlled through its own RF remote (lights on/off, fan off/slow/medium/fast, and timer).
Three standard wall switches for the lamp.
The problem is, if I switch off the lamp through the wall switch, the remote doesn’t work. The lamp needs to be powered all the time.
What I want is to avoid this, and change the wall switches to act the same as the remote, sending RF codes instead of turning on/off the power in the lamp, and is not feasible to change/modify the lamp or its wires.
At the same time, it would be awesome to integrate this with Home Assistant.
The wall switches are at the entrance, and one in each side of the bed. I was thinking in change the wall switches by ones with RF + Z-Wave capabilities, and capture the RF code from the lamp remote for the switches to reproduce it, also using z-wave to comunicate with Home Assistant … or something similar.
Your first hurdle will be if you can capture the RF remote signal. I have 3 ceiling fans and I could only capture the codes for 2 of them.
The second issue will be finding a wall switch that can be integrated into HA. Most of the wall switches need a neutral wire at the switch to work. Most (US) wiring only have the hot wire available.
Then if all of that gets worked out next will be making sure that the actual state of the light stays in sync with the displayed state in HA. You can do that as long as you never use the remote again to control the light. But, because RF devices don’t give you state feedback, as soon as you use the remote HA will have no idea the the remote changed the state of the lamp.
My only solution was to buy a Sonoff iFan02 and use that in place of the existing fan controller. But in your case you can’t modify the fan. And you will still have the issue that any wall switch you buy to control the light will still need a neutral wire.
Honestly, ceiling fans have been the biggest problem I’ve had so far trying to get integrated into HA.