Wife did a plot-twist on me and asked me to automate a fan I wasn’t planning on.
This Hunter Fan (model 51038) is AC but has ‘pull chains’.
It doesn’t have the red and blue wires up in the canopy.
Can I still control this? (I’m assuming I’ll have to disassemble the body of the fan and somehow find the equivalent red + blue wires down there and intercept them and wire them up to the VTM36? Any pictures of this?
Can I just leave the old (on/off) switch on the wall until I’m confident that I can control the fan with the VTM36 from Homekit?
are the there special wiring instructions for the White 2-in-1 dimmer switch?
You should not have any problem with an AC fan. The incoming hot or switched hot lead is going to be connected to the hot lead for both the fan and the light pull chain switches, so it should not be that hard to find.
Before you install the module, make sure the pull chain for the fan is set to high.
Yes, you can leave the dumb switch in place for the time being. It will have to remain in the on position to keep power to the module.
The wiring depends upon if your hot originates at the switch box or at the fan box. Either way, you just need a constant hot and a neutral at both locations. There will not be a load on the switch.
If your hot originates at the fan box, you more than likely have a switch loop. In that case, you will rewire at the fan box to send a hot and neutral to the switch box. There is an Inovelli wiring diagram for this if this is not clear.
Thanks Bry, as usual.
“not so hard to find” … we’ll see if that’s true or not! They aren’t in the canopy or the light unit… so I’m going to have to open up the fan motor housing area.
How would I tell if the hot originates at the fan box? (and yes… pointers to wiring diagrams would definitely help). I’ll tackle this tomorrow when my brain is working.
That’s kind of strange. If you think about it, there is an incoming hot(s) and neutral that are connected to the fan and motor conductors with wire nuts, which are typically tucked into the fan box. They should be readily visible when you drop the canopy.
Start at the wall switch(es). Do you have one or two? Pull the switch and inspect the conductors.
If the power starts at the switch box, you’ll have two sets of conductors (i.e. 2 Romex, etc). One set, a 2-wire if you have Romex, will be the incoming hot and neutral. The other set will be the one that goes to the fan box. It will either be a 2 or 3 wire.
If you only have one set of conductors (i.e. 2 conductors, exclusive of the ground), then you have what is referred to as a switch loop. You’ll find this in older installations before the electrical code required that a neutral be present in the switch box. This indicates that power originates at the fan. A constant hot is sent to the switch box over one conductor and returned switched over the other. The neutral stays at the fan box.
Figure out which one you have and we’ll go from there.
Fan is installed, and paired with Homekit. The additional wires weren’t visible when I looked last night… but with some poking around and better light I found them and from there things were easy and light (on off) and fan (multiple speeds) seem to work great from Homekit.
The old fan was controlled with a single dumb switch. The neutral was not connected but there’s one in there.
There are 2 romex. Please point me at the right wiring instructions.
You are a rock star, Bry! Thank you! It was easy and obvious once I had the instructions.
I have the switch programmed for basic functionality (fan on and off, light on and off).
Now I just need to work out homekit programming to
1 - dim and brighten the light
2 - get the config button to respond to multi-taps (i think the way it was intended was for 1-2-3-4 taps to increase the fan speed to levels 1-2-3-4… is ‘rotation speed 25/50/75/100’?
There’s no ‘simple/automated’ way to do this, is there?
Is the shortcut:-
single press-
get Fan Rotation Speed
If Rotation Speed is 0
Set Fan to 25
Otherwise
Set Fan to 0
EndIf
and double press to:-
Get Fan Rotation Speed
If Rotation Speed is 75
Set Fan to 100
If Rotation Speed is 50
Set Fan to 75
If Rotation Speed is 25
Set Fan to 50
If Rotation Speed is 0
Set Fan to 25
And then do something similar for the light to dim?
