My current situation is this. I have a ceiling fan/light controlled by two switches in a double gang box. (ie, one switch controls the light, the other the fan.) There is no neutral in the box, just a 3 wire coming into the box from the fan.
My understanding is that the switch doesn't actually physically switch anything, but just needs hot and neutral to power itself. Therefore,
What I plan on doing is replacing both switches with this single switch and rewiring the celling box to send neutral down to the switch. I would just cap off the red wire at both ends.
This seems right to me and also seems safe. But I am no electrician and know little about code.
I just thought I would post it here to make sure I am not missing anything obvious.
(Incidentally, in case anyone is wondering, my plan for the 2nd switch in the box is to use a Zooz Zen34 to control a smart bulb in a lamp in the room.)
Thanks
You are correct. The switch only sends and RF signal to the receiver in the canopy. So if you bring down your hot on black, neutral and white, and just cap off both ends of the red, you'll be fine.
Yes, you can do that. In fact it's exactly what I'm going to do with my ceiling fan setup (mine doesn't have three wires down to the box; the fan is mounted in an old ceiling light box, so there's only one switched line up there).
Repurpose the switch-loop to power the wall switch, which then communicates with its proprietary module that mounts in the ceiling box (they communicate by radio).
All my ceiling lights seem to be wired as switch loops (old house, and having switches at all is fancy; the upstairs often just had pull-chain fixtures, whereas the downstairs a lot of them do have wall switches wired as switch loops). If you have any similar situation, the most important thing I've learned in my playing with this so far is that installing modules up in the ceiling fixture is a better option than using "no-neutral" switches in the wall boxes--because a LOT of the time either the number of LEDs is below the reliable load for a no-neutral switch, or else even with 5x7w, the "25w" no-neutral switch still doesn't work reliably and I'll need to install an extra load module in the ceiling fixture. But...if I have to mess with the ceiling fixtures, just installing a dimmer module there in the first place is easier and cheaper than messing with both the wall switch and an extra load.
I have a lot of no neutral switches in my house, and a lot of them are three-way, so I like this idea, but I am curious what you use for manual control at the switch in this situation, if you are just controlling a light.
Haven't done any of the couple of 3-way circuits yet (they're all in the back stairs, and shared between second and first floor units, so I'm avoiding messing with those for now). In fact one of my drives to doing this is to be able to control things from locations the original wiring didn't have a switch. It's a 100-year-old house, the wiring layout isn't, um, fully modern.
With the module in ceiling, wall box on switch-loop setup I mentioned, I can leave the original switch in place (but now just an input to the module; rewired in the ceiling box so it's no longer switching the main hot), or I can do that but also replace the original switch with a momentary-contact push button. If the light will be at all often controlled remotely through the module, I like the push button better because it doesn't sit there in the "up" position when the light is off ever. Also, with the dimmer modules I've used or read about, that also gives you local dimming, whereas a toggle switch doesn't.
Yes, it should work, and since you have two gangs to work with, you could put a manual override switch in one gang to kill power to the ceiling and the smart switch in the other gang. Put a cover on the override switch to prevent accidental shut offs.
