I’ve just moved into a new house, and the light switches everywhere are Lutron Caseta switches which are now integrated into my SmartThings hub. My problem area is the living room ceiling fan & light, which are currently connected to a Caseta dimmer originally in a 4-way wiring scheme (now with a single Caseta switch and 3 Picos). The light and fan only have a single connection wired to the switches, not separate load wires for each. As things stand right now, that means the fan has to be permanently turned off via the pull cord to avoid dimmer/fan damage.
Nice-to-haves are:
(e) be able to use the light in the fan, preferably dimmable, independent from the fan
(f) work with the Caseta infrastructure so that I can continue to have Picos on the wall that people can use to turn on/off the light and possibly the fan
If I give up on the nice-to-haves, this should be easy. I’d replace the dimmer with a fan controller switch and take the bulb out of the light fixture. Done. I’m just wondering if I can do better?
I know there are tiny Zwave switch modules that you can embed places, and maybe if there are both dimmer and fan-control versions I could put one of each into the ceiling fan and use that to separate the control of fan vs light. There don’t seem to be Caseta connected ones, though, and I don’t know how to make the Caseta Picos control something that isn’t Caseta.
I would start with looking into the fan with light. Sometimes the light(s) and fan have separate wires that are joined at the fixture and can be split to two switches (with some extra wiring from the fan to a switch location, of course).
The following FAQ describes the options that work with smartthings, but they don’t also work with Caseta. ( although the topic title includes “Alexa“ it’s the same solutions whether you are using Alexa or not.)
Lutron recently released their own Caseta fan switch, but it does not yet have smartthings integration and each of the two companies is saying the other company should do it, so I’m not really hopeful on that happening anytime soon. and it only works with fan speed, it does not control the lights.
It does work with Alexa so you might be able to get some indirect integration that way, but I haven’t heard of anyone who’s tried that yet.
So nothing that directly matches what you’re looking for, but those might give you some ideas for an approach.
Oh wow… I’d just assumed that the Caseta fan controller would “look” just like a dimmer and magically work in ST. That throws into question even my simple solution that gives up all of my nice-to-haves.
When I get some time tomorrow I guess I’ll be opening up the fan casing to see what wiring it exposes, to see if that leads me in a new direction.
I have the Caseta fan controller installed in the wall now, in place of the dimmer that was (incorrectly) there previously. It does not reliably work when the light is turned on via the pull cord on the fan, but if the light is off it works for the fan as one would expect.
As JDRoberts warned, the fan control does not get imported from the Lutron App into ST.
I’ve previously been using the Lutron light switches in Alexa by way of the ST integration. So ST imports the Lutron switch, then I only tell Alexa about the ST hub and don’t tell her anything about the Lutron hub. Today I connected Alexa directly to the Lutron hub, and the fan control works fine through voice control. Supported commands are:
Alexa, …
turn on (/off) living room fan
set living room fan to 1 (or 2 / 3 / 4)
set living room fan to low ( /medium / high) (aliases to settings 1, 2, and 4)
This setup also allows the fan to be used via the wall switch or any other Lutron Pico remotes around the room, so as to be intuitive for guests. It does NOT allow for any ST-based automation or routines, obviously.
Biggest downside: Alexa now has all of my light switches twice. Once via ST integration and a second time via the direct Lutron integration. Is there a known best-practices for managing that? (other than not to use the Lutron skill at all )
If I remove the ST-mapped version of the switches from Alexa, but I keep the ST-mapped scenes that I define for those switches, will all of that still process just fine on the ST hub?
Or will there be a disconnect when Alexa tries to activate a scene that changes the state of a device that she can’t “see”?
Good question! Fortunately, It will work just fine. Alexa doesn’t actually do anything with the scenes at all, it just passes the request over to smartthings. So it doesn’t matter what devices are in the scenes from Alexa’s point of view.
People have different philosophies on how to handle the duplicate entries. In my case, I generally find that the manufacturer’s skill often has options that smartthings doesn’t offer, So I typically use the manufacturer’s skill with Alexa and simply don’t authorize those devices in my smartthings app for use by the SmartThings/Alexa integration. So my voice commands are going through the manufacturers app, but I can still set up any smartthings automations I want for the same device.
Other people prefer to only use smartthings as their integration, so they just don’t enable the skills from the manufacturer.
Either method will work, it’s just a matter of taste.
and it only works with fan speed, it does not control the lights.
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