I’m able to control a dimmable light and on/off of the fan through ST of my Treatlife fan/dimmer switches. Honestly, that’s pretty good for me as only having 3 speeds means the speed is generally going to be medium for the majority of situations.
Unfortunately though, I’m having a secondary issue with these that is likely a result of their engineering.
I have purchased 4 of them through Amazon, 3 have been installed. Of the 3 that have been installed, 2 of them are in adjacent bedrooms that are on the same circuit at our breaker. That means the two switches are sharing the same neutral wire.
What I’m seeing happen is when controlling the light of Fan A, the light on Fan B will flicker on for a split second and then back off as the light on Fan A ramps up from 0->100% in brightness. So somewhere between 1-99%, there’s enough voltage being fed back through the line to actually light up a DIFFERENT light on the circuit. This is completely wild to me and I have a background in electrical engineering.
So you might ask, do I have a single low wattage LED light being flipped on by interference in the line? Unfortunately no. These fixtures have 3x 60W incandescent bulbs so quite possibly the easiest lights to dim. The fans came with them and I never got around to swapping out for something more energy efficient but presumably if I did, it’d be worse.
I contacted Treatlife and they are telling me that it’s impossible for a switch to work with all dimming situations and basically are assuming I’m using low wattage non-dimmable LEDs (or similar) meaning it’s my fault. They asked for me to try incandescent bulbs. I responded saying they are already incandescent so this should be simple and I’ve never seen anything like this and their claim seems a bit wild to me. I’m still waiting to hear back from them but it hasn’t been that long yet so I’m not concerned yet about their support turn around, just thought the initial answer was lazy.
It seems like they are dimming by dumping voltage instead of adding resistance in the line. That resistance would normally result in the dimmer itself heating up and there’s where the energy loss is going, to heat. In this case now, they are trying to feed it back through the line which can potentially cause issues with things later on in the circuit.
This is also only repeatable in one “direction”. I can trigger the light on Fan B by turning on the light on Fan A but not vice versa. I didn’t trace the wires but this makes me believe that A is first in the loop and B comes later before returning to the panel. It also happens whether I hit the switch manually or try to control it via any app integration, of which there are many.
I’ll still probably try and get some other bulbs just to see what happens because I really want these to work but I’m pretty disappointed right now. These are the only rooms in my entire house that share a circuit and the house is 30 years old so it’s not like code has changed that much since then and everything else in the house was wired great.
Hopefully eventually someone will make one like this that does integrate.