Every home typically has some kind of fan(s) that keeps its occupants cool during those hot summer months. Usually either found in the bedroom or living room spaces, these fans usually come in two styles–pedestal or tower fan (with tower fans becoming more popular than ever over the years). However, despite them being such a common device, very few models actually offer modern smart home support. This doesn’t mean you can’t easily fix that though.
Any fan that has an IR (infrared) remote, can easily be modified to support your smart home setup. Allowing you to control it using Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa with your voice, or integrating its actions into various scenes/routines so that it can interact with other devices or events. Thankfully, most modern fans do come with a remote.
How to do it!
The trick is find yourself an IR blaster that connects to something like TUYA’s Smart Life app (which supports Google/Alexa devices). If you have a Samsung SmartThings hub or other hub device, you can opt for one that supports that instead (although SmartThings will also work with TUYA supported devices, as well as Home Assistant and many others).
We are going to focus on the TUYA Smart Life app since you’ll find the most IR blasters out there that support it and it can integrate with so many other hubs and devices from there, offering plenty of flexibility (and these devices are typically quite affordable).
IR blasters do exactly what they sound like. They blast IR out into the world. The ones that support the Smart Life app (available for both iOS and Android devices) are cloud-driven and are typically around $15-$20 (quite affordable).
You download the Smart Life app, register for an account, and add the IR blaster as a device. Once it is connected to the app, you can now click on the IR blaster within the app and start adding sub-devices (the devices the IR blaster will control). As you can probably guess, fans are only the beginning as it can control many other things (you can find my more detailed story about this here). Not only that, but there is a built-in list of brands/devices you can select from. Most of the common brands are supported (ie, Lasko, Vornado, Dyson, etc).
If your band or model isn’t supported, you can manually add it and teach the IR blaster the IR commands needed by pointing the fan’s remote at the blaster and assigning each function to a virtual button in the app. In most cases though, your fan will likely be supported (we haven’t run into one that wasn’t (yet) ourselves.
Now that you have the fan added to the Smart Life app, you can add it to automations within Smart Life, or enable the integration with Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa. If you have other hubs (SmartThings, Home Assistant, etc), you can enable any integrations there as well.
I personally use Google Assistant at home and added the fan as part of the “Goodnight” routine. So when I say “Hey Google, goodnight” to my Google Nest speaker, Google will ask what time I want to wake up (setting an alarm), and then it will turn off the lights, power various other things down around the house, and finally turn on the tower fan (I simply unplug the fan during winter months so it doesn’t trigger).
Just like that, your non-smart fan is now incredibly smart. It can be controlled by Smart Life via scenes/automations, or manually via your phone within the app, or integrated into many other hubs and devices.
Did this article help you? Feel free to share some of your fun ideas on how you have made use of an IR blaster at home in the comments below.
1 Comment
thank you for the article