None of us should underestimate how much other 2.4 Ghz interference (in my case, primarily WiFi) may cause the Zigbee signal to appear intermittent based on what Zigbee channel your Smartthings hub initially set itself to.
I have 2 of the KoF Wink fan controllers. One worked fine from day one. The other was intermittent off and on from day one. Finally, it went to being intermittent permanently.
I tried the following fixes in several different permutations over a week to no avail
1)Restarting hub twice
2)Resetting fan controllers with off/on breaker toggling until customary blinks were received, but not on intermittent fan
3)Deleting both of the controllers from Smartthings and re-adding
4)Hard reset of hub
Finally, decided to research Zigbee WiFi interference at the below link.
Discovered my WiFi AP was set to auto channel and had set itself to channel 1. Smartthings Zigbee channel was set to 14. Because of the way the Zigbee channel numbers are offset, WiFi 1 and Zigbee 14 were too close. As soon as I set the AP channel to 11, the intermittent fan controller responded and has been working consistently since then.
Sure enough that did the trick. I bought a Peanut Smart Plug and added it to the only outlet I have in the 10 foot gap between my fan and hub and voila! It’s been rock solid for days! Thanks for the suggestion!
Assuming you have called the main device “Living Room Fan”…the handler should have automatically created the following:
Living Room Fan Light
Living Room Fan Low
Living Room Fan Medium
Living Room Fan Medium High
Living Room Fan High
Living Room Fan Comfort Breeze
These will not show in your thing list, but will appear as options in your smartapps.
You will need to open the Amazon Echo smartapp and select each option above you would like to use with Alexa. Lastly you need to “discover devices” in the alexa app.
You should now be able to say “alexa, TURN ON living room fan medium"
Got it to work. For some reason, it pulled it in as Fan Low, Fan Med, Fan Med-Hi and Fan High. So when I said, turn the fan on medium, she didn’t understand. When I said turn the fan on Med, she did. So I renamed everything.
I ended changing the child device names to Fan 1 (for Low), Fan 2, Fan 3, and Fan 4. Since it’s really awkward to say “Alexa, Turn on Fan to Med-Hi.” Also since Alexa and Siri/Homekit basically recognize the fan speeds as individual switches it makes more sense and is easier to say Alexa (or Siri), Turn on/off Fan 4.
I did a cursory search through the thread, so sorry if this has already been approached. I have HomeSeer HS-WD100+ dimmer switches that I am trying to get to mate up with the controller. I have installed both of the device handlers, and they are working properly. The problem comes with ST’s automation is it doesn’t work with the fan controller. I can get it to turn the light on and off, since the device handlers outputs as a light, but it can’t control the fan. Ideally, I would like it to turn the light on and off with a single click and then adjust the fan speed with a double click up or down (I don’t know if it would be able to turn the speed up or down according to the direction clicked, but that would be ideal). Anyone have any idea how to make this happen?
Yes. I have both. The fan with wink controller and separate wink controller. Both work just as you’d expect. These controllers are fairly universal. I am sure there are fan’s that it wouldn’t work with. But they’d be in the minority I believe. Chances are it will work as expected.
See if you can figure out who the distributor is and if they’ll sell replacement parts direct to the consumer.
Essentially, you gotta do something similar to what @dalec described in the OP of this thread.
I have no idea if King of Fans sells this wall remote part too. Personally, I just ordered one from Home Depot because it’s 35 bucks and I don’t really care that it comes with the receiver.
Yep, that’s my feeling also. The receiver and remote together costs $35 and it’s just not worth the time and effort to try and purchase the remote as a spare part. (If you are successful in finding the remote as a spare part, It will probably cost you more than $35 anyway)
Received my controllers this week and had a 50% success rate at installation.
Our living room fan, a Hunter, is wired exactly as expected and had plenty of room in the canopy for the wiring (unlike my last, non-smart receiver installation at our old house), installed and tested in around 30 minutes. With a Zigbee smart plug pretty much directly overhead, I was even able to leave the antenna inside the cover and avoid cutting out a notch.
Our bedroom fan, a Monte Carlo, looks like it has capacitative control - lots of wires in pink, yellow, gray like someone showed in one of the other ceiling fan threads. Giving up on that one for now - we have an Echo in the living room so that’s the one where networked control is more useful anyway. The controller would replace 2 switches of a 3-gang box, and I wouldn’t mind losing the third since it’s a switched outlet we never use - so now my fallback is to stuff the receiver into the box like @TrueFlaNative1957 did (without the slick tablet interface, for now). That’s a project for another weekend though.
The device handler looks fantastic and worked without a hitch (so far). Thanks to everyone who had a hand in development and testing!
