It won't work if you use the phrase "turn on fan" or "turn fan on", but is should If you use the phrase "set fan speed ..." and use one of "on", "off", "low", "medium", "high".
If the only thing in your group is the Fan, then it won't work. You must also put the Echo inside the group. Alexa only knows two basic things for identifying a device, the device name, and the device type. It actually can know more with special ASK definitions, but for our purposes, it only knows the two. If the fan's name is "Living Room Fan" then you must call it by that full name, to control only that device. If you have 3 devices all of the Fan type and you say turn off all fans, it will turn off all three fans. This is also how Alexa works with Lights. If you say, "Turn off the lights" it will either ask which one, or turn the all off. And if you say, "Turn off all lights" they all turn off.
Because of this, you can create groups. Typically, these groups will be named after the room. I have the following groups: "Living Room", "Kitchen", "Dining Room", "Downstairs", "Upstairs", "Master Bedroom", "Office", "Guest Room", "Gym", "Garage", "Back Room", "Backyard", "Front Yard". By creating a groups, and adding device into the group, you can now control all the devices in that group at once. Such as, "Turn on living room lights" or "Turn off Kitchen". on/off controls any device in that group that supports the on/off capability. If devices support level (0-100%), you can set the level of all dimmers (for instance) with, "Set Living room to 50%". If a fan support Level control, then the lights, and the fan will all go to 50%.
About 3 years ago, Amazon listened to us users, and added a further shortcut. Instead of having to refer to the group name to control every device in that group, you can now leave the group name out of your request, provided you assign an Alexa device to that group. So, upping my game, I put an Echo Dot or better, in every room. As I upgraded my Dots with better units, I migrated older Echo Dots to less common places, like my garage, and back room. So, in my living room, I have an Echo Studio named "Living Room Echo Studio", and I assigned that echo to the Living Room group, along with all my living room lights, and my living room TV. In my office, I have an Echo Gen 3 Speaker that I called "Office Echo" and I assigned it to the group "Office" which contains a TV "Office TV", Ceiling Fan "Office Fan", two Hue lights in a hue group call "Office Light", a wall dimmer switch "Office Light Switch". Now from inside the Office, when I say, "Alexa, set fan speed on" it will turn on my ceiling fan. It does this because the Echo in the office heard me, it's associated to the Office group, and the only fan in that group is the office ceiling fan. The same is true for the Master Bedroom, and Guest Room too.
So, if you assigned your Echo to the same group that the fan is in, then the central cooling fan should not turn on.
What we cannot do at this time is say "Alexa, Turn on Fan" or "Alexa, Turn fan on" (or off), because of the implementation of the Alexa integration in HE, and thus my post.
If you launch the Alexa app, and navigate to the fan, you will see that for the speed, you can pick different options, and they work (provided your fan supports the speed selected). But if you tap the on/off button, it does not work most of the time. This is the issue we are addressing. The fan is not behaving as a switch capable device.
