Ceiling Fan Control

Fan control and Minder to the rescue

Although is is a somewhat belated post, thought it might be worth putting up.

I installed a sweep fan into my daughter's bedroom and used three relays to control the three speeds (standard capacitor control job). Used scenes to switch between the speeds ie when high is on, switch low and medium off etc. After running the fan for a couple of weeks, I noticed we never use low speed or high speed... only medium. Why waste the two relay channels?

Decided to put a fan in the Master bedroom too, only this time only used medium speed. perfect!! New problem. Fan on, at night, LED too bright on the Saturn switch. Even after dropping the level down to '0%' for the indicator, still too bright. In the end, had to use the Minder to rescue the situation. Assigned a different group address to the indicator, had Minder set it to on if the fan is on and security is disarmed and set it to off if the fan is off or security is night armed. perfect!! Also have a reminder if the night-arm is not set on the security. Would have been nice to do it all on C-Bus, but ahhh what can I say... Thank goodness for Minder

Cheers

 

Any electronic gurus?

Curious whether using a dimmer channel through a bridge rec with a smoothing capacitor would be a means to rid the dimmer cieling fan noise issue?

Has anyone had any experience with dimming a bridge rec and using the output? Is it very choppy or would a big enough cap smooth the cut wave without giving a full power supply?

I am sure I saw ceiling fans for caravans and winebago that must be 12 or 24vdc. Though the downfall I suppose would be the lack of light fitting underneath or inappropriately rated for conversion.