Greetings,
The small bedrooms both have an existing ceiling fan light combo. I’m in the US which as I understand it means the fan is 120V/60Hz AC.
The light is not a dimmer and I don’t necessarily want it to be.
I don’t care to control the fan separately. It’s got a pull chain to set the four speeds (off, slow, mid, fast) and that’s good enough.
When I look at the switch, I’ve got a three wire coming in (black, white, ground) and a three wire going out. Grounds - tied together. Whites - tied together. Blacks - one on the switch load and one on the switch line. That’s it.
I’m just looking for on/off (which always triggers the light but may or may not turn the fan on/off)
I don’t do apps - so cloud services are essentially no-go’s and local-control is much preferred.
I can do Z-wave, zigbee, wifi - and I have a Skyconnect on the way which I want to tinker with matter/thread to learn about it but I don’t actually have that setup/working yet.
Zooz said that only the bottom switch of the Zen30 will work from their devices. But the occupants of the house didn’t care for that solution.
Innovelli essentially told me to use one of their canopy modules but I’m not “a fan” of that approach (mostly because I don’t trust myself doing the work solo to take the fan down and get it back into place working…)
no apps
control the light only
leave the fan controls on the pull string
you only have constant incoming standard power to the fan assembly from the ceiling
you don’t want to have to rewire the fan in any way due to your lack of abilities
I’ve got it…magic!
but seriously the only option you have is a smart bulb that you are going to have to control separately and will need to either use a smart wall switch in “disconnected” mode so the switch doesn’t actually physically control any powered device on the output but it just sends a signal to turn the smart bulb on or off.
Or you can use some sort of zwave or zigbee wall mounted button. But that is going to look out of place as just a button hanging around compared to other regular light switches.
if those aren’t good options then I think you’ll need to seriously look into the magic option.
Home Depot sells books on ohms law and wiring if your interested. Theres millions of options.
Ill see if I can find my other topics on this but some are EU so be careful.
Phillips I believe sells a light that can adapt to being on a smart switch(so the switch will relay its state and the light is still smart and programmable), you could re wire a fan to be controlled by relays…
Id attach the fan to a smart switch and then just try to leave it always on low speed if its pull chord.
a smart light should always be powered if you want complete control and some smart switches offer passthrough power and control via the network and assistant.
I’m also thinking your options are limited. Best bet is a canopy option because you were only given enough wires for all on/off.
Or seriously look at new fans that have remotes. Some allow you to mount the remote over the switch so nobody flips it anymore and learns to button press. I did this in the past and was very pleased.
If you switch the hot wire going to the fan canopy it will control the power to the whole fan assembly. So if you turn off the smart switch then both the fan and the light will turn off together.
With the ceiling fan motor in the equation, you will want to look for smart switches that can handle higher amp loading.
For example, Lutron Caseta has one for Smart Home 5A Switch (PDW-5ANS or 6ANS) specifically designed to turn on and off fans, but that’s not zwave or zigbee or wifi.
The small button from Zooz ZEN30 is another option, but sounds like someone has shut down that idea.
Maybe the D215S from Leviton, which is Matter over wifi, would work. You will want to verify with Leviton… I recall there is some size limitation on the motor. EDIT: the webpage says up to 3/4 HP motor.
IMO the canopy solution from Inovelli, (paired with a zigbee wall switch that does zigbee binding,) is still a better / more elegant solution, though.
The fan thing apparently was confusing. What I was trying to say is that I don’t care about controlling the fan speeds via HA (which a lot of people seem to care about on this topic). I simply need a switch that can handle the load turning on/off if the fan was manually set to the highest speed. There’s never a time where the fan is intentionally running AND the light is off. So turning off the light and the fan at the same time is fine (in other words, they do NOT need to be independent of each other). Turning on/off the light is the primary functionality - any occupants who want a fan on low/med/high/off settings can do that manually and that’s fine.
The Zooz30 will only work with the smaller button on the bottom, not the much larger toggle switch. I tested this out, and it was no ideal. No one in the house liked using the small button alone and when I set some z-wave associations so that the toggle (that wasn’t hooked to anything) would turn the device on/off - it was really slow and no one liked that in the house.
Again, I’m not in a position to be able to take the fan fixture down for the canopy solutions.
Thanks for the suggestion @k8gg on the Lutrons and Leviton - initial searching looks promising. I’ll research those more in-depth.
[Edit: Boo. Looks like the Leviton really wants an app to configure the device before adding into Home Assistant. At least from the articles I’ve found so far on integration (also their own documentation)… and for a double booooo it looks like it’s cloud polling… Leviton Decora Wi-Fi - Home Assistant ]
Another option is to use this, and instead of any speed control, you likely can configure it in a way to go only on/off (ie only 0% and 100%) on the internal relay. Blue Series (Zigbee) - Smart Fan Switch – Inovelli
Given the configurability that Inovelli offers, very likely you can achieve that without any problem, but verify with Inovelli first.
And then you can use other buttons and double clicks and triple clicks for different things - different scene controls flexibility.
I did watch the official installation video for the Shelly plus 1 - it looks like it would work great. However, in my research it looks like you have to use the app to first configure the device to be on the wifi network. If this isn’t the case, then this would be an option for me and I’d like to know more about how to configure without their app.
Thanks!
Sweet! That was the bit of information I needed that wasn’t coming up in the search box. Thanks! It makes it a contender for sure as I research these options.
After watching a bunch of videos and reading online - I ordered the Shelly Plus 1 PM. Shipping is over a week out though so it might be a few weeks before I report back.
Ultimately I decided on them for two reasons 1) I got 3x for the price of one of the other switches (though I may have to invest in rocker switches instead of toggle - we’ll see how annoying that is for the family) 2) If they don’t work out for this situation for whatever reason, it looks like these will work great for another project I want to work on in the summer.
