My pet peeve is remote controlled fans. I want a physical cord or switch. The remotes are so flaky and annoying.
There's no clean mechanism to control a fan's speed in-band on a normal AC wall switch.
What?
Every house I've ever lived in over my many decades of life has had ceiling fans. I've never known one to fail, never known one to be noisy, and never known one to have inadequate power. I've personally installed a couple and know those got wired straight into AC mains power... so unless they have a converter built in, I figure that every ceiling fan I've ever lived with has been AC powered.
Unless you've been working with absolute bottom of the barrel fans (and those fans are worse than I could possibly imagine), this smells like industry propaganda to me.
> There's no clean mechanism to control a fan's speed in-band on a normal AC wall switch.
OP is asking for a normal pull chain or switch... one that's attached to the fan housing, not some doodad that's embedded in the wall and needs to be specially wired into the fan electrics. I've been to the houses of a few friends that have had fans controlled with a handheld wireless controller, and I can confirm that that was -overall- way worse than hauling my ass up to pull a damn chain.
I'm pretty anti remotes and apps for things, but it's pretty handy when my spouse can start the fan from her phone in the middle of the night instead of waking me to go turn it on in the middle of the night.
Our current one isn't too loud and it has a nice range of speeds so you can run it without it getting super wobbly. But overall, I still dislike fans. :p
I should have been more specific - yes, you can "dim" AC fans and it's purely electrical. "Dimming" DC fans and similar switching loads requires detecting shaped pulses, and is really dirty and not something you want to do.
But I don't think torque or longevity are actual issues with AC fans. Just efficiency and noise.
DC fans don't have the hum, get up to speed faster, etc. They can operate at a far greater range of speeds and still maintain high power output. AC fans operate in a much narrower envelope.
Every high-end fan sold today is DC. It's possible that you didn't see the power supply.
> way worse than hauling my ass up to pull a damn chain.
Many people have high ceilings where a pull chain couldn't be humanly reached. Sure, this might work if you have 8' ceilings. Which high-end fans have pull chains?
Technology Connections "Ceiling fans: the simple idea we keep screwing up" YouTube video is interesting. The old old fans had oiled bearing baths and overbuilt motors, extremely overbuilt compared to today standards which means they'll probably keep going forever. If you are nerdy and interested it's worth a watch.
I went through this pain when I bought ceiling fans a few years ago. Various manufacturers offer switches or remotes you can attach to the wall but that take batteries - the options for actual wired switches are slim. I ended up with a few hardwired Big Ass Fans wall controllers that work pretty well - but their current-gen wall controls are hardwired bluetooth remotes, which is subpar for something that's connected via wire. (And they cost $210/each, which is pretty egregious for a wall switch.)
There absolutely is. If you have a fan with a light controlled by separate wall switches, you have two hots running to the fixture. Take one, and leave it unswitched always on to the fixture, and use the second switch (or fan controller) and use it as an input to the controller on the fan. Done.
Unfortunately, I haven't seen this implemented anywhere.
This message brought to you by the hours I've spent annoyed by exactly this misfeature in our new bedroom fan. Fanimation does sell a wall mounted remote that can be wired inline with a switch, so at least there's a single point for master power and a remote you can't lose. Unfortunately, there's a noticeable delay between flipping the switch and the light turning on.
This is common, but it's also not uncommon for only one circuit to be wired. The "clean" qualifier is because even if you have that line, you don't have a common DC ground.
> Unfortunately, I haven't seen this implemented anywhere.
Many Z-wave switches use the three-way traveler line for out-of-band signaling (instead of a traditional three-way switch arrangement.) (Homeseer, Inovelli, etc.) This line will communicate dimming, double taps, etc.
There is.
I specifically purchased a Fanco Horizon DC fan as it has an optional physical wall switch which connected to the existing wiring for the fan it was replacing.
The caveat being if you use the wall remote, it's not compatible with the model with built in LED light fixture. This was a non issue for me as wanted to avoid any fan with built in LED light due to when the led panel fails, it'll be extremely difficult to replace vs having independent lights in the room.
I think most DC fans don't support wall remotes because it's cheaper and simpler not to, and provide a remote control instead. It's not a technical issue as you can absolutely find DC fans with wall controllers they are just harder to find.
How did it work electrically? This is what I mean by "clean."
I’ve looked at a product called Bond that seems to facilitate it. But haven’t yet tried it.
It wasn't that hard; I used gnuradio with an SDR to see what the remotes were sending and just pressed buttons and flipped switches until I figured out what all the bits were. There was no encryption whatsoever.
It might be that POE power supplies get hot - I've noticed the POE hats for the raspberry pi need a fan
I tried changing channels in the remote but that didn't seem to help much. With the second neighbor, the fans were in my living room and their bedroom. We agreed to control fans in shifts (I turned mine off at night).
It's hard to believe it's just a very unlikely coincidence. Maybe the channels are too few or narrow to be useful? How hard would it be to implement some psuedo-UID?
Are you mad? That would cost low-single-digit pennies per unit!!! </pennypinching_bigco_derision>
That's what I meant when I wrote, "I tried changing channels in the remote but that didn't seem to help much.", and wondered "Maybe the channels are too few or narrow to be useful?".
Things drawing an average of a few hundred microamps while the fan is running. Probably because it's blasting a keep alive packet once a second or so. It does that because a transceiver costs an extra 50 cents.