So im looking for a ceiling fan thats going to work with smartthings directly but I cant seem to find any unless I use an older ac motor version. I noticed dreo ceiling fans now have matter support. Does anyone have any experience with them? Do they fully work on smartthings?
I can’t say anything about Dreo as I don’t have one, but I can say a little about another brand called Altitude. They are an American Brand out of Boca Raton, Florida. They sell Matter over Wi-Fi DC Ceiling Fans. I have one, but sadly haven’t installed it yet as I need someone to rewire my ceiling mount. The bracket that comes with the fan is smaller than my Hunter Fan’s bracket which I could just lag bolt into the plywood in my ceiling, but the Altitude’s bracket is too small to lag bolt it to the plywood and the ceiling mounting box I have in there right now is not ceiling fan rated. Again this is just a me problem, but since I haven’t installed it yet I can comment on the fan’s performance myself. I can comment on the fact that the VP of Engineering of Altitude post regularly on Reddit (username: noraono). She said the only problem on people have seemed to have was on Home Assistant; that there are only 3-4 fan speeds plus off even though the fan’s remote has 6 plus off when it should have 100 speed plus off. Well right now SmartThings only supports 3-4 fan speed plus off like Home Assistant. If your using Google Home, Alexa, or another Smart Home system the 100 speed settings work just fine. I do believe according to one post on this forum someone is working on making a driver to allow for 100 fan speeds a possiblity, but that will be sometime in the future. These fans seem to be sold at Lowes and Menards for the Matter compatible models and other places for the non-smart models and most are around $250 or less.
So I just emailed dreo and they told me that they don’t support matter, but they do have a home assistant integration through hacs. Super lame. I really wanted theirs 513s model. Unfortunately altitude fans only sell in the usa and im in canada. Theirs no canada options anywhere, and to be honest, I dont like any of the fans they offer.
Sorry to hear that. I do see one Altitude fan that looks similar to the Dreo you wanted, called the Sakai. But again you may not like it and even if you did I’m sorry to hear you can’t get them in Canada. I do know of some other options, but they aren’t as ideal of a dedicated Matter Fan, extremely expensive, or not reliable. The first option is Hunter Fans, they just introduced a couple matter controllers to retrofit older AC fans with a dimmer switch simliar to the Inovelli’s switches and a smart display switch which can tell the weather and stuff. The smart display is almost as expensive as just a fan and still only runs older AC Fans, not only this Hunter has a bad track record with smart technology as of the last few years. That’s why I remove my Hunter Fan as the smart intergration had become almost none existent or buggy as could be. Again you could go with a new Hunter Matter fan, but again reliability is terrible and the new ZenTech models that they introduced that many news outlets covered along with they matter switches don’t say for sure that these fans are actually matter compatible. From my research these new ZenTech models are still only Wi-Fi cloud based even though they are DC Powered. The only true Matter compatible Hunter Fans I’ve found were at Costco and their reviews prove just how terrible Hunter Fans smart integration really is. The next option I know of is Big A$$ Fans, both their Haiku and Professional models, but these usually start at $850 and go all the way to about $4,000. The last option I have for what you might want is Inovelli White Series (Matter over Thread) On/Off switches. These are the only switches Inovelli has approved for DC power, they say the other versions could possible run a DC Fan, but they don’t endorse it and will void your warranty. Anyway if you went this way, I believe you’d need 2 switches one for the fan and one for the light unless you hook up the lights via smart bulbs. Then you could use one switch and run automations for the lights. The only problem with this is you would need a none pull switch/remoteless fan from what I see. This means your limited to wall switched only fans and I don’t know if they even make DC wall switched only fans (sorry no pun intended). If they do then you could get a smart remote (Zigbee, Z-Wave, or Matter) and program automations to run the fan remotely. But as of right now these are the only options I know of that use Matter and are DC powered. I believe in the next year we will see more show up, but right now it’s very limited.