I’ve been doing a lot of experimenting with this.
I tested the switch with a pedestal fan (didn’t have any random ceiling fan motor to test it on). It didn’t work. On medium and low, the motor only hummed. Maybe because it consumed too much current?
I tested incandescent light bulbs on this switch and I discovered something very interesting! This switch works great as a dimmer switch!!!
I found that the more current the light bulb consumes, the dimmer it would be when put at medium or low. With a 60w light bulb, it is very dim and makes a nice night light on low; on medium, it makes a decent amount of light but not too much. Makes a great accent light! And on high, of course, it runs at full brightness.
But with a 15w light bulb, the three modes barely made any difference.
Do you know how these switches work? They use metal-film capacitors to shunt the current. On high, the device (fan or light) is connected directly. On medium, the device is connected in series with a 2.2µF capacitor or something like that. And on low, the device is connected with a 4.4µF capacitor or something like that. I’m not 100% sure how they work, but I know that they work by letting part of the wave through or something like that. They work like resistors but they are a lot more efficient because they don’t waste the extra power as heat!
Compare this to an incandescent lamp dimmer. They work using a Triac chip that “chops up” the sine wave. Depending on the setting of the dimmer, it turns on at a certain part of the wave (say at the peak) and stays on until the wave goes to 0. This is 50% output.
I also tested this with CFLs. Because it works differently than a triac dimmer and has a cleaner wave, it does not cause CFLs to go crazy. A chopped up wave screws with the electronics of a CFL and makes it go bonkers. But with this fan control, the CFL just functions as if it were on a lower voltage (probably because it is). The CFLs I tested had varying results. Some worked on low, with a slow start. Some just glowed a little but could not start (but if I set to medium then set back to low without switching off, it would work). Some flickered a little. One CFL, a Phillips Marathon, strobed on and off frequently on low. Probably because of the special ignition circuitry inside, so when it launches, it doesn’t have enough power to sustain it, so the arc fails and it tries again.
Most CFLs worked fine on medium. They just were slightly dimmer.
Another benefit of using a fan control as a dimmer switch is that you don’t get any noise in the filament. With a dimmer switch, you get a buzzing noise or something like that from the filament when it is dimmed. But with this, the filament is silent. It also doesn’t cause the lamp to flicker!
Is it more efficient than a triac? I don’t know, but I think it might be!
I don’t see why they don’t use these for dimming lamps! They are really simple and cheap (well, they are supposed to be but the companies like to make profits so they make people think they are really complicated and expensive).
I got pictures of the incandescents in each setting. But for the CFLs I took videos so I cannot post those here.
And in the dark:
