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christophilus • yesterday at 3:27 PM • 6 replies • view on HN

My pet peeve is remote controlled fans. I want a physical cord or switch. The remotes are so flaky and annoying.


Replies

15155 • yesterday at 4:08 PM

DC fans are infinitely superior to AC fans (noise, torque, longevity, etc.), which is unfortunately why this became a thing.

There's no clean mechanism to control a fan's speed in-band on a normal AC wall switch.

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WaitWaitWha • yesterday at 4:01 PM

My MinkaAirs use 303MHz remotes. No pull chains. This frustrated me so much, last night i got an ESP32-S3 + CC1101 and reverse engineered the signal to the fans to be also control it from Home Assistant. Now, if i lose or break the controller, i can still switch the fans & built-in LED on & off another way. not perfect, but it is in my control.

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m463 • today at 5:05 AM

I want more POE devices.

It might be that POE power supplies get hot - I've noticed the POE hats for the raspberry pi need a fan

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samudrijan • yesterday at 3:32 PM

Your fan doesn’t need Wi-Fi?

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mmooss • yesterday at 8:19 PM

In two apartments, the remote affected the neighbor's fan and vice-versa. At first I wondered at the fan's erratic behavior, especially switching modes soon after I changed it. Then I guessed the problem and spoke to the neighbor.

I tried changing channels in the remote but that didn't seem to help much. With the second neighbor, the fans were in my living room and their bedroom. We agreed to control fans in shifts (I turned mine off at night).

It's hard to believe it's just a very unlikely coincidence. Maybe the channels are too few or narrow to be useful? How hard would it be to implement some psuedo-UID?

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cmclaughlin • yesterday at 4:03 PM

This annoys me too. My Casablanca fans have a wall switch which is hard wired to power only for on/off, but the fan and light controls are sent via a radio frequency signal. The most frustrating part of this, is that the RF transmitter inside the wall switch is battery operated. I have to unscrew the wall switch a couple times a year to get to the batteries.

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