There are some brighter spots and darker spots in the experience. One dark spot is the lack of a built-in lamp. Big Ass Fans offer a light kit as a partial remedy. The kit is $95. That's cheap only compared to the $825 base price for the Haiku.
Darker a spot than the lack of light is the light itself. The fixture installs pretty easily over the hub of the fan. It connects to the main fan circuit board with a short cable. The lit portion is about six inches across and studded with a ring of about twenty LEDs surface mounted on a printed circuit board. The fixture is surrounded by an attractive metal heatsink casting which adds several extra inches to the overall diameter of the fixture.
The ring of LEDs is covered with a choice of either a frosted white lens or a dark smoke lens. The white lens filters little enough light that it is still easy to get an unpleasant eyeful of LED. The lens does take what would be twenty sharp spot beams and blends them into a uniformly dim and harsh light. It would take a naked forty watt bulb hanging from the ceiling to achieve the same effect. Kudos to Big Ass Fans for managing that with such efficiency.
The remote is another sore point. Credit card sized remotes were pretty cool in 1993 when the Macintosh TV came out. They were still a bit cool in the late nineties when Bose bundled them with Wave Radios. In 2013 they are just cheap and nasty. You can buy essentially the same remote from dozens of alibaba vendors for a couple of dollars. The remote battery tray interchanges with the cheap remote included with my kids' color-change novelty lightbulb ($5.97).
The fan side of the remote is not so bad. Blue LEDs illuminate for a short time to indicate what fan speed is now active. this is especially helpful when you want to be sure the unit is off, not just very very slow. It also beats pull chain systems that cycle back from high to off. That would be a real pain with the Haiku's seven speeds.
Worse than the cheap remote is the cheaper wall bracket for the remote. The bracket looks like some type of one time use medical thing. Maybe it started life as a complimentary floss cutter to be given out twice yearly by dentists. The sharp edges on the inexpensive part could manage that well.
Hunter remotes frequently hang on a hidden bracket that allows the remote to be used as a wall control when docked. The Haiku fan bracket covers at least five of the ten remote buttons. The light controls are completely obscured.
Big Ass Fan's answer to this criticism might be to point to the available wall control unit. That unit adds an additional $175 to the fan price. Worse, it dumps me back where I started with Honeywell -- a hard-wired unit that collaborates secretly with a fan over an RF link. No thank you.
Neither of these stories provides any good options for integration into a home automation system, unless the RF module supports an open standard and bi-directional communication.
I watched the online installation video for the RF module. The fan does not ship with the RF receiver. The small receiver board ships together with the wall unit. I imagine that this is for regulatory reasons as much as cost. It is a tiny board that plugs into the main fan board with a single row pin header with few pins. Maybe another module could install there. Maybe a wifi module. Maybe an Arduino. If Nest can solve the user interface challenge of configuring a wifi smoke detector on your ceiling, then it must be possible for a ceiling fan.
No comments:
Post a Comment