I have a ceiling fan in my dining room that is hard-wired (The light is on a switch, the fan is hard-wired.) To make things worse, I can't put the fan on a switch at all because the idiot electrician that wired my house in 1995 wired my deck light to the fan. When I dug into the box where the switch is, I thought I could add a switch for the fan, but when I did, the deck light wouldn't work unless the fan was on.
So I'm looking for a relay that will allow me to control the speed of the fan. I've put an Enerwave relay in, and it works well for on/off, but no speed control.
Anyone know of a good, reliable relay that will control speed?
If you have a canopy (it has to fit in there), the Hampton Bay Fan Controller module is one of very few options I'm aware of at the moment. It's Zigbee and allows remote control of the fan and lights, so I'd keep the wall switch always on (like you would for smart bulbs). Inovelli is supposed to be coming out with a Z-Wave product soon-ish (next year?) that does something similar and comes with its own wall switch. I've also heard of people using a "regular" fan switch (like GE's or HomeSeer's) in the ceiling rather than at the wall, but you'd need a lot of room to make that work and I can't vouch for code compliance with that (and obviously it would be a pain to re-pair if ever needed and you'd have remote control only).
How about switching things around a bit... rewire the fan power to come from the light switch, which would allow you to use a smart fan controller switch to control the fan speed.
Rewire the fan’s light to be hard wired to the same circuit as the deck lighting. Insert a few smart bulbs in the fan. Then add a simple button controller to control the fan’s smart light.
I personally really like the Lutron Caseta Fan Controller and Pico remotes. Together in a double switch plate, they would like like two switches had always been there. You don’t even need to change out the single gang electrical box, as the Pico is designed to be surface mounted in this fashion. If you decide to use Lutron, you’ll need the SmartBridge Pro2 for the switches, dimmers, fan controllers, and Picos to work with Hubitat.
The nice thing about Lutron is that it natively works with Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Logitech Harmony Hub, SmartThings, Apple HomeKit, Home Assistant/HASSIO, as well as Hubitat. Lutron really is a future-proof technology choice, IMHO. And their products “just work” all the time, every time.
Opening it up again would be too much work, but I'll try to describe it. The Fan/light is wired with a 3 conductor wire (Black, White, Red.) The Light is on the Red, the Fan is Black. The deck light is tied off the black in the box in the ceiling at the fan.
If I had the motivation to patch some sheetrock, I could rewire the deck light, as there is an electrical outlet below it. I think it might even be in the same stud cavity. I'd have to cut the wall open and run a new wire though, and I've never been good at patching sheetrock nicely.
I've thought about doing this idea of having smart bulbs instead of a fan switch. I've done that in the past, and don't much like it as an option. In fact, before I ever bought my first smart switch, I was buying smart bulbs. One of my first automations, about 5-6 years ago, was to have the lights on the front of my house come on at sunset, and I used smart bulbs to do it. It works, but I much prefer normal bulbs and a smart switch.
For this case, I would rather have the relay on the fan, even if it doesn't control speed. To be honest, I don't adjust the speed on it all that much anyway, it was just a convenience I'd like to be able to add if I can.
I would put the Hampton Bay Fan Controller In the fan and then remove the switch from the wall, tie the two wires that we're going to the switch together to make it permanently on, then replace the switch with a Pico Remote and Wall Bracket. Then put smart bulbs in your deck light.
Then you can program the Pico remote to do something like the following:
Button 1 Short Press: turn on fan light
Long press: turn on deck light
Button 3 (the round one): cycle through fan speeds
Long press: turn off fan
Button 5 short press: turn off fan light
Long press: turn off deck lights
This way you can control the fan, fan lights and deck lights all from one location.
I would not recommend this unless you want to use the circuit breaker when you need to reset the Hampton Bay unit---and if you don't replace the antenna or have at least one repeater very close, there will undoubtedly come a time when you do.
Yes you will definitely want to have a zigbee repeater close to the fan but as long as you do it's been rock solid for me. Alternatively, you could leave the switch in place and just mount the Pico remote with a wall plate beside the switch but you're just asking for someone to turn it off and then nothing will work.
