HBFC Ramping & Reverse Support

I've been using the Hampton Bay Fan Controller for a while and I've encountered two problems I'm hoping to resolve.

  1. The first is that there appears to be lack of support for light ramping. I'm happy to. make the changes myself and contribute them but now that it's an official driver I'm not sure how to do that or if it's already in the works.

2, The fan will sometimes reverse by itself. Seems to happen only when power is cut to the HBFC and restored. It's very strange to me since the neither the driver nor the HBFC are supposed to support reverse (although my fan does).

As in physically reversing? If that's the case, there's something wrong with the fan. I would think that if that was happening, it's gonna ruin the motor. I don't think they're built to withstand that.

This is a known issue. It is actually a deficiency of the Zigbee implementation of the HBFC device. @mike.maxwell added support within the official Hubitat driver at my request a long time ago. So, the driver is issuing the Zigbee commands, however the HBFC ignores them.

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The controller doesn't support electronic reversing and isn't supposed to be used with fans that do. It's only supposed to be used with fans that have a physical switch for reversing.

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Thank you both so much for your support and quick responses.

@april.brandt - The fan motor does support reverse so there is no risk of damage. Although the fan in question is a Minka Aire, there are Hampton Bay models that have a reverse option. Sometimes it's a switch on the fan canopy.

@ogiewon - Thanks for the clarification on the ramping limitations. I had read through as many threads as I could and it appeared to me to be a limitation of the Hubitat driver.

@Ryan780 - I spent some time researching the reversing issue (i.e. lots of Google searches etc) and it seems to be a fairly common issue with either the controller or the fan. It also doesn't seem to be random and I can reproduce it by using the remote to cycle through the four fan speeds. I'll keep researching this.

One other question, Hubitat driver cycles through three speeds yet the HBFC/remote will cycle through four speeds per the manual and my own experience. Is there a reason why the driver only supports cycling through three speeds?

Evidently, it is undocumented, but some people report that if your fan supports electronic reversing, you can reverse the fan by holding down on the speed button on the white remote. I don't have a fan that can do this so you'll have to tell us if this is true or not.

The official HBFC Hubitat Driver cycles through all 5 speed settings as shown below. I used the cycleSpeed button on the Device details page to test this.

Thank you ! You are absolutely correct and I can confirm that holding down the speed button on the remote that comes with the HBFC does indeed reverse the fan!

Thank you @ogiewon. My mistake. I had interpreted the cycle settings listed when I was creating a button controller as the speeds that would be cycled through.

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