haiku

seasons turn slowly /

honeywell fan slower still /

leaves and fan come down

I live in an old house without central air conditioning. Just before I bought it, the house was subject to a thoughtful remodeling undone only by poor judgement and shoddy workmanship. The house gained all of the bulk and ugliness of central air conditioning with almost none of the benefit. The previous owners installed a useless central fan with ducted registers throughout the house. I suspect that it would all have to go in order to properly install a central air system.

I prefer to pretend that it is not hot. In winter, we heat with cast iron radiators and a hot water boiler. We love them. I support my summer comfort fantasy with a variety of window and portable air conditioners and ceiling fans.

The previous owners took the no-AC dividend -- probably ten thousand dollars -- and plowed a hundred dollars of it directly into one of the worst ceiling fans that they could buy. That fan hung in my living room until last week. I had hoped it would be difficult to buy a fan that bad by accident but these appear to be the new default.

The fan was tied to an Honeywell branded in-wall combination light and thermostatic fan control. It had five buttons for fan control, a thermostat slider for automatic operation, and a single button to control the fan light. The thermostat never did anything but turn the fan on at unwelcome moments. The light switch was the real problem. It was never easy to operate. Near the end of its life, the rubbery button required more than 50 pounds of force for the unit to register a press. That's 1% of the thrust produced by the Garrett (now Honeywell) ATF3 turbofan.  The wall switch had none of the familiar roundness of Honeywell's most beloved products.

Honeywell products (above: HFT7000) should be round
Photo courtesy Honeywell

50 pounds of force seems like a lot for a computer scientist to muster but this wasn't even the worst problem. The switch included a dimmer function. Once you jammed a stick into the button and pressed hard enough to engage the switch, you had about two microseconds to let go before the built-in dimmer started dimming the fixture. Once dimming started, you have to press and hold until the dimmer reaches bottom and then starts to rise. You have to let go just when it reaches its apex.

I finally ripped this control out of the wall and I expected to install a SmartHome FanLinc Insteon controller in the fan canopy. When I got the control out of the wall, I saw many fewer wires than I expected. I took the fan apart and found out why. The in-wall control is really an RF control that matches a large honeywell fan/light control mounted in the motor housing of the fan. The fan does not want to be controlled by anything but its module. I didn't want to map out the tangle of wires to adapt another control to this motor.

All gone. Fan, module, control, everything. Gone.

This scheme of hard-wired controller and proprietary RF protocol is depressingly common. My module is labelled Honeywell, but similar units are labelled Hunter, Westinghouse, Hampton Bay, Litex, or Craftmade. I wouldn't buy any of them. I have other variations on this theme throughout the house.

Wireless fan control by Hunter
Photo courtesy Hunter

I give the nod to Hunter for the ease with which neighbors can turn on your fan. Ever left for vacation and wondered if you remembered to shut the fan off? No problem with Hunter. Your neighbors need try only sixteen DIP switch combinations before they shut the fan for you.

I've put up with flakey home automation devices for many, many years. Even the worst of the bad X10 devices was more reliable than these fan units.

I would like my excellent Nest thermostat to control my fans. Nest has expanded their lineup recently with the Nest Protect smoke and carbon monoxide detector. Maybe Nest can expand their ceiling-based lineup with a few spinning blades and make a great fan. I think there is room in the market for it. There is certainly room in my house for it.