I am sorry if this has been covered before, I have read many topics and still cant get to my answer. I have Harbor Breeze ceiling fan that shares a hot wire for fan and lighting. I am trying to control these both independently with smartthings and or Amazon echo. I do have two wall switches but the fan itself cannot seem to split the light and fan capabilities. Turning on one turns on power to both then you need to use the remote control to control them independently. Is there some kind of device I can connect to this fan to tell Amazon echo to only turn on the fan light or only turn on the fan’s fan?
What does the other wall switch control? If you pull the fan down, are there two hot wires up there (one from each switch). Does the box with the switches have a neutral (usually white) wire?
Sounds like you have what I had. Someone had taken the wires from the light and Fan and put on one switch. So they could use a RF controller in the fan electrical box vice 2 switches.
If the other switch is still unused you might be able to split things back out up in the ceiling electrical box. Then use a smart fan switch and a smart light switch to control each separately.
You should take the fan down and figure out what wires are going where? Then you’ll know better what your options are really.
Please be very careful around electricity and use meters and non contact voltage checkers. Take pictures or make drawings before you unwire anything so you have something to go by when you want to put it back.
I was in the same kind of situation needing to control light and fan separately though they were tied to one switch. I found and installed a dual switch relay from Amazon linked below:
I installed it in the fan canopy (in the ceiling). It requires a neutral wire and an always hot wire. So I installed the always hot in the ceiling to the devices hot, neutral and the fans neutral to the neutral wire in the ceiling, and the wire coming from the light switch on the wall comes out in the ceiling, that I connected to aux 1 and 2 of the device I linked to. Then load 1 of the device goes to the fans hot and load 2 goes to the lights hot.
It required a custom device type and smart app to keep it all in sync but it works perfectly! I can control light and fan separately from the app or Alexa. The wall switch also turns both on and off.
Thanks for the replies guys. Just to be more clear I do have two wall switches and I do have neutral wires with the wall switches. As it stands now one of the wall switches does not do anything as the fan I have only has three wires and is only wired to one switch. It is quite possible I am missing something very stupid and simple but I will explain it the best I can. The fan that I removed had 4 wires which I believe one was an independent hot wire for the fan, one was a hot wire for the light, one was common and one was ground. In my ceiling I have two hot wires one goes to each wall switch. Now my new fan shares a hot wire for the fan and the light so basically I left one of the wires disconnected in the ceiling and wired the fan’s one hot wire to one of the wall switch hot wires. So one wall switch turns on the fan the other wall switch no longer has a purpose. I would like to make it so that the fan and light on my current fan can run independently however. Can this be done with my current setup? I am not really electrical at all and I do not know the purpose of the Neutral wire at the switch. Thanks I will read over the current suggestions and see if I can make sense of them but if I am missing something simple please let me know.
bamarayne
(Jason "The Enabler" as deemed so by @Smart)
6
I feel your pain.
I built my house 3 years ago and pout in two switches for my bedroom fan/light. Then i installed the fan.
The fan only has one hot write input. It splits the power internal via the remote control. Unless you go in and redo the internal wiring there is moo way to do what you want.
Well damn, this is what I was afraid of… I wonder, if this is the case. Can I maybe in the very least eliminate the hand remote and buy some kind of RF device that I could tell Amazon Echo to fire either the light or the fan signal to the fan… If that makes any sense.
I wired up my ceiling fan in the kitchen with 2 hot wires ( 14/3 ) but I never liked the fan much but when looking for a new fan almost all of them have only one hot wire these days which blows.
Yes, that seems to be the trend. But I still wonder about a RF device that works with smarthings that could fire a signal to the fan via Amazon Echo. I don’t know to much about this but sounds possible in theory.
I imagine a ceiling fan that only has an always hot powering it and no wall switch other than a remote would work with this but if the unit in the fan crapped out you would have no control of it until you dropped the fan and replaced it.
I agree as the remote for the fan is RF then as long as it’s the same signal. It would be nice if the rf unit could be outside the fan so you could still use the remote if you wanted and no need to drop the fan of the unit dies. Something thats z wave in and rf out.
Hey I’m in a similar boat as you except my fan and light are tied to the always hot pole in my wall switch. It can only be controlled by the fan remote control. Could you provide a bit more detail in which connections you made? Specifically the Aux connections. Thank you
