Help with fan / light combo from a newby

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Good morning

I have four ceiling fan / light combo’s in each of my bedrooms and would like them to become smart fan / light combo’s, allowing for control from both a phone as well as using either siri or Alexa voice prompts to turn on and off.

1). I believe they are all hampton bay fans.

2). I am by no means an electrical expert, but pulled the plate off. Currently it looks like they are controlled wirelessly as the switch in the wall is not connected by wires. If I remember correctly when installing the fans, there is a dummy box in the base of the fan that connects to the wireless switch through a tseries of toggle switches.

3). However, behind the switch, there are capped wires. looks like two sets and a bare metal wire as well. Hopefully that means it can be hard wired and that there is a ground or neutral wire.

4). It is a single switch box. Currently there are both fan and light switch controls on the same single switch.

What options are available for me? I have a lot of apple products including iphones and ipads, but also just got amazon echo show 5’s in each bedroom and downloaded and set up the Alexa app on my iphone.

Thanks from a newby and I hope to hear from you soon.

Stay Safe, Stay Well

Adam

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This forum is for people who are using the Samsung smartthings home automation platform, so all of the questions and answers are assumed to be in that context.

However, it sounds like you are looking for a HomeKit solution so that it can work with Siri and your iOS devices. That’s a good choice, it’s actually how I have my own fans set up, it’s just that we’re not likely to be able to help you here. :thinking:

Replace the Whole Fan

With Homekit, it’s actually very simple because there are very few fans that work with Homekit. So you do have to replace your existing fans with one that works with Homekit, but once you do that, integration and set up are super simple. And there are some that work with both HomeKit and Alexa, which is exactly how I have them set up at my house.

At our house we use the hunter symphony fan, which we got on sale at Black Friday I think two years ago. But there are some other brands as well.

Retrofit Options

If you don’t want to replace the whole fan, there are some workarounds but they get kind of MacGyver-ish and pretty complicated. And again, the discussions in this forum would involve the Samsung platform.

One of the best options that doesn’t work with smartthings is to get the Lutron Caseta fan control switch. That way you are just replacing the switch, not the fan. But you do also need their smartbridge, like I said, these can get a little complicated. But it will work with both HomeKit and Alexa.

There’s a Homekit forum on Reddit that might be helpful to you:

Or there is a brand agnostic general home automation forum Which should be helpful if you want to look at retrofit workarounds.

In particular, if you just want to use Siri, but you don’t need HomeKit, or you just want to use Alexa and not Siri, there are quite a few options. Here are some examples:

And here is the brand agnostic home automation forum at reddit:

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Hi Abirozy,
As JDRoberts has stated this forum is for all things SmartThings so any responses will relate to these devices. However in purely generic terms as I see it you have two possible options:-

  1. Assuming the wiring you have found does indeed go to the fan base then you could replace the existing wireless switch with a smart switch that is voice controlled by Alexa and connect it directly to the fixed wiring which would need to also be directly connected to the fan. (I am assuming there is a wireless relay in the base of the fan that is operated by the current switch)
  2. Alternatively you could use a zigbee/wireless smart relay in the base of the fan (assuming there is space) wired in parallel with the existing wireless relay. This could then be voice controlled with the Echo Show with the benefit of the existing switch still being able to operate the fan manually.
    I am assuming you are in the US so cannot advise on what SmartThings devices are available in your country but I believe there is a better range than the UK. I am sure JD Roberts or someone else could better advise, although there is a post on this forum for different types of SmartThings compatible wall switches.