So, my neighbors said he has some weird thing happening to him where his fan light, fan turned on for no reason. Well, it turns out, I was setting my bond up during this time. His fan is centrally located, and my bond is centrally located. We have fairly large house with block wall in Florida. So how is this happening?
Funny thing is, I had to relocate the bond closer to my fans when setting up… This seems a bit odd.
There’s huge variability in the sensitivity of the receivers, and RF signal propagation can be capricious. So it’s not surprising that you might reach your neighbors’ fan.
Your remote (and possibly receiver) should have some “DIP” switches that let you adjust the address of the fan to eliminate this interference. This is often called “frequency” in the fan documentation.
Yeah, but I have other neighbors and many fans… cant imagine what this must be like if used in an apartment complex. Maybe there should be some sort of power setting.
Yes, RF is very odd. With a previous generation of remote controls (29MHz), it was not uncommon for remotes to activate receivers thousands of miles away, but only for a few months once every 11 years due to solar cycles. The remotes that Bond mimicks (300-450MHz) have fewer interference issues due to shorter range, but odd things can still happen, such as you needing to be very close to your fan with the Bond, but then another fan a few hundred feet away is in range.
In fact, this is a quite common problem before Bond. Depending on your fan, there’s one of two ways to fix the interference issue:
Is your ceiling fan turning on and off on its own, even when you’re not in the room? Don’t call the Ghost Busters just yet. Most ceiling fan remote controls come with the factory set frequency. If two or more ceiling fans have the same frequency they can be controlled by either fan’s remote, which can have a range of 40 to 50 feet. Hence, the other remote is messing with your ceiling fan. This is more likely to affect you if you live in an apartment or a townhouse. A good rule of thumb is to create a unique frequency as soon as you get your fan.
For “DIP-switch” receivers:
Or, for “auto-learning” receivers:
https://secure.img1-fg.wfcdn.com/docresources/841/117/1171422.pdf