How to Make a Ceiling Fan with a Light and Remote SMART (Complete Step-by-Step Guide)

Introduction

Creating a smart home often involves replacing something you already own with something new. But what if you could convert what you already own into a smart home device?

One example of this is a ceiling fan. There are several ways to make an existing ceiling fan become smart, but the steps you take and equipment you need depend on several factors. Is your fan AC or DC powered? Does it have pull chains or a remote? Is there a built-in light? Are there separate switches on the wall for the fan and light, or one switch for both?

I’m going to show you how I converted my DC-powered ceiling fans with a built-in light, remote control, and single wall switch into a smart device in Home Assistant and Apple HomeKit. This approach lets you control the fan and its built-in light using a wall switch, your phone, your voice, and in home automations.

Main Points

Old Setup

Alright, let me first talk about my old setup, which is found in several rooms of my house. I’ve got the Hunter Apex II ceiling fan with a built-in light. Power to the fan and to the light were controlled by a single wall switch. To control the fan and the light separately, including adjusting the fan speed or dimming the lights, we had to use a separate remote control that operates at a frequency of 434MHz.

I wanted to make our fans smart for convenience. I envisioned fan automatically turning on when it was too warm inside and someone was in the room, and turning off when the room was empty.

I also liked the idea of controlling fans using my phone or voice. Sometimes I get into bed at night and realize I forgot to turn the fan on. As silly as it sounds, it’s hard to get back out of bed when you just got in, right?

Requirements

To make our fans into a smart home device, I had two primary requirements.

1. I must be able to control the fan or the light using a physical wall switch, a phone app, and home automations. My wife and kids depend on physical switches, so this idea would have never landed if I took away the wall switch option.
2. The state of the fan and light must be correct and consistent between the smart home platform and what the device is actually doing. I wasn’t willing to make the tradeoff of having my fan become smart, but the state getting out of sync, meaning my smart home platform says the fan is on when it’s actually off. There are lots of “solutions” online that show how you can control your existing fans using an app, but these often require losing the physical wall switch option or the device state getting out of sync. That wasn’t going to work for me, so here’s what I did instead.

New Setup

For my new setup, I am using two things: a Bond Bridge, and a Zooz ZEN32 Scene Controller. Before I walk through how I set this up, let me give you the big picture.

First, I’m going to connect all of my existing ceiling fans to the Bond Bridge.

Second, I’m going to connect the Bond Bridge to Home Assistant. This will make all of my ceiling fans viewable and controllable in Home Assistant, and ready for including in home automations. Since I’m already using HomeKit Bridge with Home Assistant, my fans will also appear in the Apple Home app. As an option, you can connect the fans to Amazon’s smart home platform for voice control using the Bond Skill.

Third, I’m going to replace the existing wall switch with the Zooz ZEN32 Scene Controller so that I can still control the fans and their built-in lights from a wall switch.

Watch on YouTube for a complete step-by-step on how to make your existing ceiling fans smart.

Final Thoughts

So now, anyone in my household can operate the ceiling fans and built-in lights using a switch on the wall, app on their phones, or with voice commands.

We also have the fans automatically turn on and off in home automations based on things like the room temperature and human presence.

Watch on YouTube

Featured Tech

Bond Bridge: https://amzn.to/4aiX0pt
Zooz ZEN32 Scene Controller: https://amzn.to/3WFRpGF
Z-Wave Coordinator - Zooz 800 Series Z-Wave Long Range S2 USB Stick: https://amzn.to/3TVLL1x