And in these exceptional circumstances - did you touch wires that would have been live if you hadn’t killed the breaker?
I’ve had the glass separate from the bulb base before, never even came close to a shock with that. I’ve also had the cover glass separate from a fixture while working, never once came close to shocking myself. If the glass itself breaks when I touch it, I’d be more worried about the thin glass shards than I would about the electric shock I might get from any exposed wire.
Story time…
You hire a professional to change a bulb.
He looks at the bulb and sees there is a fan above it but doesn’t know how the fan is controlled.
He fails to isolate the supply.
He gets knocked off his ladder.
The matter goes to court.
Who wins?
Answer: You do, because fan or no fan, one of the first rules an electrician should follow is to isolate the power supply before changing the bulb. He violated the health and safety rules. You get paid out for the dent he left in your floor.
It seems to me like you’re missing the point a bit; you asked what you should do to avoid getting hurt. Turning off the breaker is what you should do. The fact that most people wouldn’t do it is irrelevant.
Ok, but the technique you’ve chosen to attract that attention doesn’t reflect well on you.
Turn off the breaker while working near the fan blades so it minimizes the risk of having them smack you in the head. Definitely turn off the breaker if you intend to do any electrical work on the fan. There’s some ladder safety you should familiarize yourself with as well.
Good luck and please don’t end up in https://www.reddit.com/r/Whatcouldgowrong/
Most remotely controlled wall switches (Zwave and Lutron especially) also include a local lockout switch that interrupts electrical flow at the switch. In the absence of a local lockout device, I follow LOTO procedures (Lock Out, Tag Out sometimes called LOTOTO for Lock Out, Tag Out, Test Out) at the branch circuit protective device to ensure all potential energy has been safely removed from the system I am working on.
But something I haven’t seen mentioned here yet is the use of a 9 foot ladder and no mention of PPE such as fall protection. General safety procedures at every manufacturing plant I step foot in states when ascending a ladder above a height of 6 feet, fall protection with a fall arrest device must be used and properly secured to a tie off point that allows the fall arrest device to activate without causing the user to impact the surface below them.
No local lockout on my switches (TP-link). Your point about fall protection is taken.
put a smart button up there. Setup automation that when you press the smart button, it turns off fan control. Press it again, turns it back on with 30sec,1 min, 5 min, etc delay (to give you time to get down)
Install a light switch with scene control, such as innovelli. Setup scene so that when you press down 2x on the switch, it turns off the light+ disable to fan. 2x up then turns OFF the fan disable.
I like this… its better than my thinking which was to have an announcement from my smart speaker ‘Fan will start in 10,9,8…” (mostly because I don’t want it coming on if I happen to be asleep at a weird time)
Look honestly… how likely is it you would be changing the bulb at a time this could happen? How often do you need to change that bulb anyway? The answer is to isolate the fan if your risk assessment mandates you do that.
I think he’s trolling, there is no way this much thought or discussion could/should be done when turning off a switch at the wall for 1 min will provide the solution.
If you need to change a bulb so regularly that this is even an issue, you have far larger electrical problems to worry about.
I’m not familiar with how those kind of lamps/ceiling fans are wired. Not a common thing here. But I get a feeling that it gets a direct supply from fuse/breaker box and controls itself?
Is there no switch on the wall to control it and thus switch off the motor and the light?
I feel like I’m talking at cross purposes with most people here. Let me try starting over, maybe that will help.
So while I was working on the project I had this sudden vision come in to my head of the fan coming on on its own while changing a bulb. While unlikely, I thought it bore thinking about, and not the kind of thing I normally think about when it comes to automation (one normally thinks ‘worst case scenario’ is just the automation not working, rather than physical injury). Yes, unlikely even if the fan comes on and my neck is directly in the blade path that the hit will actually knock me off the ladder, but ‘what if it did’ comes to mind. This brought up images in my head of that old Simpson’s episode when their smart home is set to ‘evil’ and tries to kill them, or HAL run amok. I found the image funny, and thought it a fun way to bring up a problem (in general) that maybe often doesn’t get thought about. (Not so much the specific problem, but the general problem that edge cases of our automations might cause safety issues).
My general thinking on bringing it up was basically ‘how to engineer around the problem’. I got ‘well you should always turn off the breaker before you change a light bulb anyways, and if you do that, its a non issue’.
While yes, if I do that its a non issue, it doesn’t really solve the problem, it just avoids it. The only benefits for the problem at hand is equally well achieved by simply turning off the automation in home assistant. Turning off the automation is easier and faster than tripping the breaker and I’m already concerned it might be missed/forgotten about.
Then much of the rest of the thread devolved in to the merits (or lack thereof) of tripping the breaker in general for changing a light bulb (as the only benefit of flipping the breaker over disabling in home assistant is general safety considerations when changing a bulb in general)
Anyways, I like the idea of a smart button to disable the automation (I could place it on the ceiling fan itself).
You can do the easy and most reliable thing: isolate the fan electrically, or you can implement a button that disables the fan automation. Or you can just turn off the automation.
The wiring here basically is breaker box, to wall switch, wall switch to fixture. Here the wall switch has been replaced with a smart switch (actually 2, one for the fan, one for the light). Home Assistant has control of the switches. The suggestion was ‘why not switch off at the breaker’, in large part I don’t like this because one breaker might control multiple fixtures, and determining exactly which breaker controls what is a (potentially) lengthy process.
Not to mention the fact that the easiest solution by far is just to not climb so far up the ladder and change the bulb whilst it’s slightly above head height, thus negating any issues of coming into contact with the fan. 
That makes too much sense.
Solving the problem is exactly what it does - it stops the possibility of the fan turning on, that is the desired outcome and the simplest procedure.
No automations to write and test, no extra smart switches mounted near the fan, not logging into HA to disable the automation - just flick a switch off for 1 minute, problem solved.
For the sake of (over)engineering a solution, if your smart switch has power monitoring, you could try to detect a change in power equivalent to the bulb burning out (while still switched on) and disable the fan automation based on that - probably easier to achieve with non-LED lights, as the variation in power will be more significant. After the bulb gets replaced, it’s more likely you’ll remember to re-enable the automation, or else your hot room would. 
But, you know, you should kill the breaker before messing with mains power equipment, regardless of the voltage…
yes, update your t-link to something better to have power measurement.
Should be on - no power => failure, turn automations off
Additionally wire it so that the wall switch is used too, to a switch input of the smart relay. Switch down, automations off.
And the additional button somewhere. Seems good enough.
this doesnt prevent the voltage being applied by accident. PLCs are not fool proof, any kind of glitch can happen. But I’d say it takes down the odds of unwanted motor start.
Omg guys, I’ve got it!
Pressure plate in the floor below the light fitting. If the weight it measures is exactly the weight of the OP, a set of ladders and a spare bulb it can send an email to a monitored inbox.
Then when homeassistant sees the email has arrived it can trigger an automation that takes a still image from a camera that’s aimed at the centre of the room to see if the ladder is actually present.
Then, we’ll activate another automation that uses some AI to monitor the live feed from the camera to establish the direction of travel of the person on the ladder.
As the person travels up the ladder we’ll gradually reduce the maximum speed of the fan to zero rpm. As the person descends the ladder we’ll gradually increase it back to standard.
Once the camera sees the person safely on the ground, we’ll disable the camera feed, and play the Terrahawks theme tune over the PA system.
And once the ladder is removed from the pressure plate, we’ll trigger the final automation which triggers a servo attached to an esphome, that makes a little stick man dance in the corner of the room at the exact resonance that it reduces the new bulb to powder so we can do the whole thing again.
Exciting stuff.
What if the smart switch fails? You press it, think the automation has been turned off but it hasn’t and then the fan starts up.
You’ll be wondering why you smart switch has failed while laying on the ground.
A warning sign is sometimes effective but ugly and easily ignored.
As with anything automated - if you don’t want it to automate - remove power to it. The simplest method is the most effective.
If you are worried about others doing it - maybe remove the smarts completely?
I live in the UK with 220v.
Do I turn power off to light when changing the bulb, yes, so it doesn’t blind me when I screw it in.
Do I isolate at the breaker, rarely. Should I? Probably.
Would I isolate at breaker if I was up a 9 foot ladder with the added potential to fall. Definitely.
Have I been given a shock with 220v? Yes. Was it fun? No, not really.
Have I been hit in the head with a ceiling fan? No. Why? Because I isolate the power before doing work with them.