Fan/light/light controller/switch

New home under construction. Primary bedroom will have a ceiling fan with light kit and five recessed LED lights. No decision has been made on which ceiling fan/light or recessed lights will be installed. All lights will be LED. My preference is not to use smart bulbs.

I want to control the fan (on/off/3-speed) and fan light light (on/off/brightness), and recessed lights (on/off/brightness) from the same location. There's a large structural column (in the wall) about five inches from the door, so I would like everything to fit in a two gang box mounted between the door frame and the column. My preference is to do it all with z-wave devices talking to HE.

The recessed lights will also have a 3-way on/off switch on the opposite side of the room.

The fan/light and the recessed lights will be at the end of the wiring, i.e., all of the wiring will go thru the switch boxes first.

I thought maybe this could be done with Lutron Caseta switches (fan controller for the fan and double dimmer for the fan light and recessed lights) and the Caseta bridge, but I'm not sure.

Any other way of doing this other than using a three gang box instead of two gang? Can this be done with just z-wave devices? Is the Inovelli LZW36 a good solution (when it is in stock)?

YES! I have five of them unfortunately sitting in a box since I am in a short term rental house. They were great when I had them in home I owned once I made sure antenna was outside of fan body.

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Make sure a proper 3-wire + ground is run from the box to the fan in case you ever need it!

I think the LZW36 is about your only option for zwave control of the fan. Even finding Zigbee control is very difficult. You are going to find that nearly any new fan you purchase will come with a remote control, so it already has a module in it. That would get ripped out and replaced with the LZW36 module that the wall switch talks to (via RF I think).

I had two fans in my house with modules already and have 4 fans total. Since the LZW36 has been out of stock for so long I decided to just try a bond hub (found on ebay for $65). It works better than I expected. The dimming control is terrible on the remote/fan modules I had (press and hold to dim). In the Master they ran a proper 3-wire to the fan so I actually bypassed the module and wired the lights direct to a Zooz dimmer using standard bulbs. The module is wired hot and connected only to the fan. So the lights are zwave and the fan is controlled via the bond hub, through HE via custom actions on a zwave remote I got.

The other bedroom with a newish fan which came with a remote, I connect to the bond hub and again am using that only for the fan control. The lights are still connected to the module but I do not have anything tied to the on/off lights toggle so it stays on all the time. The bulbs are smart bulbs. We just leave the wall switch ON all the time, eventually I will wire it hot and add a smart switch for a button controller. This room they only ran a 2-wire to the fan so I cannot wire the lights directly to a dimmer :frowning:

I just got another fan/light RF module online that works with the bond hub for $10 for one other fan we have, and then I also got a little Tuya wifi fan controller as well to test. Plan to do similar as above on both of those fans, one has a 3-wire and one has a 2-wire.

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I think the biggest curveball is...what fan is going up? DC motor vs AC motor makes a big difference.

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All of the ceiling fans will get 12/3 w/ground from the switch box. Since I'm new to all of this, the house is being wired "traditionally", i.e., nothing will depend on smart switches. Although some locations for smart switches/devices are obvious even to me, I will probably start off with zero, or close to zero, smart switches, then gradually implement them after we move in and get a feel for the house.

I haven't bought a ceiling fan in years, so I'm behind on the technology. Seems like most fans have AC motors, so that's probably what we will put in.

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I think they're about 50/50 depending on where you look. Also depends on size. I was looking for an AC fan that was 60" a little while ago and there were surprisingly few options. Plenty of DC options though.

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All the ceiling fans in my current home are circa 2000, and don't have remotes (or maybe they were all lost by the original owner). So I hadn't considered the issues regarding fans with proprietary remotes and switches.

I guess I will just make sure the electrician runs 12/3 from the switch box to the fan, and figure out how to make the fan/light smart once we get moved in.

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