How to determine state of fan

Okay. So there’s a small win you can do right away, without any third-party home controller setup.
But there are some important caveats, so consider these before going down this path. The caveats are not both acceptable to many folks, so we may end up at the bottom of my reply. :smile:

A) this will ONLY work for the Light kit part of fans, and not the Fan Motor
B) this will ONLY work if no one uses the original ceiling fan / light remote. stick it in a dark drawer and only use Google Home / Assistant, or the Bond app.

If you can accept both A and B caveats above, then you can enable Bond’s State Tracking for each device’s Fan Light.
With that, a Google command to “Turn Off Fan XYZ Light” will only send the Light Power Toggle command if Bond last issued a Light Power Toggle command and updated its internal State Belief to say “the Fan XYZ Light was last known to Bond to be ‘On’”. If Bond last thought the Fan XYZ Light was ‘Off’ and you ask Google to tell Bond to turn Fan XYZ Light ‘Off’ (or all lights in a room / house ‘Off’), then Bond won’t send a Light Power Toggle command at all.
NOTE: the Bond Bridge is not able to constantly “listen” for the original remote being pressed, that’s why you must accept caveat B for this to work. Bond, or Bond via Google Home, is the only way you can change Fan Light power state for this to work.

If you cannot accept both A and B caveats above, then there are options which we can get into regarding:

  1. physical switches / keypads / remotes to trigger Bond actions (still keeping the original ceiling fan / light remote in a dark drawer though)

  2. Fan Motor power state tracking through third-party controllers

Here are some wide-ranging discussions that are semi-related to the (1) and (2) above. Though some of the use cases are related to shades or blinds, the strategies behind them are very similar to how Fans and Lights could be controlled via Bond’s Local API through third-party controllers:

1 Like