My current AC fans are controlled by Lutron Caseta Fan Controls.
I know there is a trend toward DC fans. Would my existing Caseta Fan Control work with a DC fan? If not, what would work? Could I still use a Pico?
I’m not very smart, so could someone explain this in a way a 5th grader can understand?
DC refers to the fan motor itself in this discussion. As far as I can tell, AC is wired to the Fan housing/canopy and there it's converted to DC. The speed is controlled by the DC voltage delivered to the fan motor and that's handled by the electronics inside the fan housing/canopy. A Remote Control tells the electronics speed and light dimming values.
Existing fan controllers in a wall only adjust the AC to the Fan housing/canopy and therefore is lost when the AC is converted to DC. Or, in other words, no, your existing fan controls won't work.
I haven't seen any solution to this. There's obviously a DIY opportunity to scavenge a DC Remote Controller and press the buttons electronically. I think you have to wait for technology to catch up. Given the horrendous time delay to get Z-device AC Fan controllers, I'm not looking to go DC yet.
An Inovelli Switch might be a DIY option too because it has an ability to decouple the switch buttons from the relay. Like a Smart Bulb, the DC Fan needs AC all the time. Then the buttons can be used, like a Pico does, to tell Hubitat to set the fan speed by yet another DIY scavenge of the Fan's remote control.
Can a Bond Hub be utilized to integrate a dc fan with Hubitat?
Yes.
With the limitation that it is one-way communication. Meaning, the hub can send commands to the fan via Bond, without knowing if those commands were received or acted upon. Further, the hub would be unaware of any manual changes to the fan's settings, using for instance, a remote.
Unlike AC motors, a DC fan motor uses brushless electronic commutation which needs an embedded processor to move. An AC motor will work simply by connecting to your wall socket. Changing speed is basically a high capacity dimmer (not exactly a dimmer, but close enough for this discussion). Therefore it's relatively simple to take an existing smart dimmer and make a few small changes to become an AC motor controller. This is very different than the DC motor since a smart device would have to communicate with any number of undocumented and proprietary embedded DC motor controllers out there. This is where Matter shows promise. If there is a smart wall switch using z-wave, a thread DC fan, and a device gateway, then it could work without extra workarounds like the Bond Hub. However, somethink like this is theoretical at the moment since neither a z-wave to thread gateway nor fan using thread exist at the moment.
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