White switch physical button behaviour

Switches General Discussion
1

Just installed my White series fan switch yesterday, set it up in the Apple Home app and everything seemed to be working.

My goal was to have the physical switch buttons not control the fan directly, just activate scenes/automations that in turn can control the fan (most of the time ignoring it) and the room’s smart lights.

I set it all up in the Home app, and I could’ve sworn it was working perfectly yesterday, a single press on the upper part of the paddle is just supposed to turn on the lights, with a long press for lights + fan, but just now I’ve noticed that single press up turns on the fan or down turns it off regardless, even though the Home app doesn’t have the fan included on single press.

Was I just not paying attention yesterday and this is how it’s supposed to work? Or is it acting funky?

2

So you really just want the fan switch to be a scene controller, leveraging the multi-taps to turn on the fan and the room lights via automations. It sounds like you do not have local protection enabled.

If you turn on local protection, then presses of the paddle will not affect the wired load. Right now, I think that local protection is off, so pressing up on the paddle causes the switch to turn the fan on. Once that is enabled, presses of the paddle are only used to trigger automations and will not affect the wired load.

3

You’re absolutely right, and that seems to have fixed it! I had read the included manual a few times and must have missed that, but found the button combo via google. Thanks!