Review on Hunter Fan Company 59628 Solaria by Todd Roberts

Putting the good stuff away first: This fan burns. It's quiet and moves a lot of air. It also looks great. The design is aesthetically beautiful as you can see from the photos. Installation was easy and the fan looks very well made. Now let's talk about its shortcomings. Before I tried the fan, I was very satisfied. I would give top marks for the installation, except due to the electrical design of this fan I double, triple and quadruple checked the wall switches and the voltages at the switch and in the junction box because I figured something must have gone wrong . Not me. I've installed many fans and this one really surprised me because it's specifically designed for unusual behavior. It takes about 5 seconds for the fan to start spinning from a complete stop, and when you turn it off it doesn't turn on. to a standstill - this gives the feeling that the switch is broken. The light will not work if the fan is not powered. It's a little less confusing if you use the switch they give you, but hardly. The instructions say you can use the two switch configuration, but it doesn't work as you would expect. Turn on the light when the fan is off? nope Then turn on the fan? Good - the fan is on, but the light is still off. Why? Because the light switch is perceived by the fan as a binary state. So, toggling the light switch simply REVERSES the power state of the lighting. This can be considered a feature as you can turn the light on with the 'remote' - more on that later - and turn it back on with the switch and vice versa, but the same cannot be said for the fan. If you unplug the fan from the controller and then flip the power switch, everything will turn off completely and the remote control function and light switch will not work until power is restored to the fan. Ultimately, this is very confusing, and since the fan starts 5 seconds after power is applied and the light doesn't come on unless the fan is powered first, and the location of the light switch is now inconsistent, the controls are too confusing to be reasonable. . .The light is a point light so it's REALLY not ideal for illuminating a room - it's very bright just below the fan but too dark outside of it - both fans we installed in this room previously have the whole room well lighted and cost less than $100. If you want to use smart switches with this fan, please choose another fan. Unusual power management is poorly suited for smart home compatibility. The product photos show a remote control that is not included. There is a remote control built into the included wall switch that can technically be used without wall mounting as batteries are required to send a signal to the fan. (I'm not sure if you should remove them if you wall mount them, but it looks like you should leave them inside, meaning you'll have to turn the switch off to replace the batteries in the future .) . Because of the wires and sharp metal mount, there's no point in leaving it on a table or in a desk drawer, but I suppose you could. The remote in the switch is used to control on/off + speed/brightness. It also has a power switch that can turn on/off the entire fan and light when installed in the wall as the main power switch. The power button is a physical switch, meaning that when it's off you can't just turn on the fan or light, you have to press that main power button first (if it's wall mounted). If you want to use existing radio buttons, things get even worse, as described above. Overall I would say this fan feels great and looks nice. But if you want to interact with the controls and don't want to drive your friends, family, guests, and even yourself crazy, choose a different fan. I recommend looking for fans with tension chains to avoid this confusing control issue. I hope this saves someone the trouble I've encountered.