We have now put up four (out of eight) ceiling fans, and the fourth time was the charm.
not enough room for the wires
There were two problems I had. The first is that, since the fans are mounted in boxes on the surface of the wooden ceiling instead of the usual recessed boxes in drywall, the boxes aren’t very deep:
Each box starts out with six 14-gauge wires: two neutral, two hot, and two ground (the fan wiring is daisy-chained) with three wire nuts. If you follow the fans’ mounting instructions, you pull those wires out of the box before you attach the fan mounting bracket. The fan itself adds six more wires, so you have a huge glob of wires and wire nuts that you have to somehow fit in the fan base.
Spoiler: they don’t fit, no matter how much you bend and tuck, so you end up with wires protruding in an ugly fashion from under the fan base as in the first photo. Worse, it’s a fire hazard since the current-carrying wires, joined by wire nuts, end up adjacent to the century-old wood of the ceiling — a setup for a housefire should the circuit become overloaded.
The solution was to ignore the instructions, remove the connector that holds the AC supply wires for the fan, and connect those wires to the AC supply using the wire nuts while leaving the heavy-gauge supply wires tucked up into the thin box. Then you can assemble the rest of the fan to the box and plug in the AC supply once everything else is connected. It’s still tight and tricky, but possible.
no way to pair remotes
The other problem was that there was no way to pair the remotes because the fans are designed to pair to the first remote they see after power is applied. But the fans are all on the same circuit, controlled only by the breaker, so the first remote you pair after turning the breaker back on pairs with all the fans. There is then no way to control the fans (and their lights) individually.
I thought about removing each fan base and disconnecting/reconnecting power so I could pair the remotes, but that seemed like a horrible idea given the difficulty associated with getting the fan bases in place and all the wires properly tucked. Plus I’d have to be doing it with the wiring hot, poking my fingers blind into narrow spaces with live wires protected only by wire nuts. Now that I’ve figured out how to leave the supply wires tucked safely up into their little metal boxes, I can much more easily lower the base and plug/unplug the little insulated AC supply separately for each fan and perform the pairing.
As each remote is paired, it gets wall mounted and we have control of each fan and light.
Now we can run the fans, have light, and banish the milde and moldew forever.
—2p