I have two combination light/ceiling fans hooked up to one switch (it's the way my house was wired). It was frustrating to try to manage which lights were on and off and which fans were running by pulling the chains all the time. Especially since the fans are multi-speed so you have to pull the chains multiple times. It also didn't help that most of the kids and even my wife are too short to do it comfortably.
So I bought two Insteon FanLincs to solve my problem.
The install was pretty easy - looking up which wires were ground, light, and fan on the ceiling fans took the longest. The only tricky thing after that was fitting it into the light fixture. It was a pretty tight squeeze.
NOTE: Before I put the FanLinc into the housing but after I had it hooked up and the power on, I had to push the button on it in order to add it to my Insteon Hub. There are two buttons on the FanLinc, a button for the light and one for the fan. I thought I would have to have to set it up with the hub twice (once for the light and once for the fan). Fortunately, when it linked up, it linked to both at once so I only had to press one of the buttons (it doesn't matter which one). There's nothing about that in the instructions and it took me a few minutes to figure it out.
Once the FanLincs were installed, I simply created scenes for the fans and the lights and assigned them to the 8 button switch I'd installed earlier.
Everything seemed to be going great until I noticed that the light flickered every time I accessed any of my Insteon switches. This got really annoying really fast. After a lot of research, I found that if you have an Insteon switch supplying power to the FanLinc it causes the flickering. Fortunately, there was a solution. Since the 8 button switch was only needed to control scenes (it would have to be always on so the FanLincs would work), I simply needed to have power bypass the switch. In other words, I would need to wire it so power was always on to the FanLincs.
So I pulled out my 8 button switch and hard wired the connection to always on. I did it by wiring both the line and the load wires together. I then added the black wire from the 8 button switch (so the switch would have power, capped the red wire on the switch, wired ground and neutral as per the instructions, and put the switch back. Now it works great and I can program the first button on my 8 button switch (normally the power on/off button) to be anything I want.
For a more technical and thorough explanation on how to have power bypass your switch, go here.
So, at the end of the day, it was not a simple install but, once I figured out what to do, it does what I want it to and I'm much happier with my living room ceiling fans. Plus I have Alexa control. Awesome!!
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