The Good: Works with almost any RF controlled ceiling fan and some window AC units. Quick and easy setup. Powerful range of signal. Works with Alexa, Google Assistant, and IFTTT. Costs far less than other options to automate ceiling fans.
The Bad: The always on LED ring on top can light up an entire room (This was addressed in a firmware update and the light can now be dimmed or disabled). Limited to six devices per BOND unit. Cannot customize locations in app.
Overall: It’s really hard to criticize a device that is a pioneer in its field. BOND bridges the gap between wifi and RF, allowing you to quickly and relatively cheaply modernize your existing fans. In time, BOND plans to add support for all window AC units, fireplace controllers, motorized shades and garage doors. Currently there are very few drawbacks to this product, and it’s a steal compared to the few other wifi ceiling fan controllers available today.
When I stumbled upon the BOND wifi ceiling fan controller on Amazon one day, it was love at first site. In the early days of planning my smart home, I had hoped to have ceiling fans that turned themselves on or off depending upon the internal or external temperature, but found it to be cost prohibitive.
Until BOND came along, the best option I had found was to install these Insteon fan controllers, which then require these Insteon wall keypad switches and these keypad button kits to make the switches make sense. It’s a great option if you can afford it, but at a total of $155/setup, and my need to outfit five fans, this was totally cost prohibitive.
Since all of the ceiling fans in my house came with RF remote kits, BOND was a no-brainer solution. With one BOND unit I was able to automate all five fans in about fifteen minutes, having to do little more that plug in the BOND, install the app and tap a button on each of my fan remotes. You can check out my article on how to set up BOND and add fans here.
The Device
The BOND device is a relatively small unit, about the size of a hockey puck or Google Home Mini. It has one micro-USB port on the back for the power cord and an LED light on the top that changes color or flashes depending on what you are doing. There is a ring of air vents around the bottom to keep the unit from overheating, and the top of the unit is flat, which is a great design because you’re going to want to put something on top of it.
As mentioned in The Bad section above, the LED light ring is always lit up in a bright blue when the unit is powered on and you aren’t trying to install devices. I keep my BOND in the smart home bunker (aka my office), and at night it would bathe the room in blue light. Eventually I stacked my Invoke on top of it eliminating the issue. UPDATE: Shortly before this was published, BOND released a firmware update allowing users to dim or disable the LED light from the settings section of the app.
It’s recommended that you install BOND somewhere central to the devices you’re controlling. I have tested it in multiple locations in my two story house, and it has never missed a command no matter where I put it.
The App
The BOND app for Android and iOS is clean and simple. Open it for the first time and it walks you through the setup process with just a few taps of the screen. Adding devices is also fairly simple and also requires only a few taps, a click of one button on your fan remote and a confirmation of the remote button layout.
Controlling paired fans is as simple as using the fan’s original remote, except that remote is now your phone or tablet screen. The only minor gripe I had with the app was that you can’t create custom locations, while you can create custom device names. This is only an issue within the BOND app, though, as the location seems to be purely organizational.
Voice Control
If you own an Amazon Echo or Google Home, this is where BOND really shines! You can easily pair BOND with either family of devices (or both if you’re like me) and import your ceiling fans and their lights if they have them to your devices, groups, and routines. For me, that meant that fifteen minutes after installing this ONE $99 device, I added TEN new smart devices to my home. Five fans and five lights, all voice activated in fifteen minutes and for $99. That makes BOND the most cost effective smart home device I’ve installed to date.
There are two drawbacks at the time of this post that I find to be slightly annoying. The first is a minor naming gripe. When Google Assistant or Alexa discover the BOND devices, they import the name that you assigned the fan in your BOND app, but also assign that name plus “light” to any attached light. For instance, Alexa would discover a fan in my kitchen as “Kitchen Fan” and the light on the fan as “Kitchen Fan Light.” It makes sense and it’s the most natural way of saying it in many cases. The drawback here is solely an issue with voice assistants. If you ask Alexa to turn on the kitchen fan, everything works fine. If you ask to turn on the kitchen fan light, sometimes you get the light, sometimes you get the fan. This is because the voice assistants will occasionally match on the shorter name before you finish speaking. I resolved this by simply renaming the lights.
The second drawback is really inherent to this being a retrofit of RF to wifi. It is difficult for Alexa, Google Assistant or BOND to track the state of the devices controlled by BOND because the fan’s and lights that it controls can’t report whether they are on or off. While this issue doesn’t show up as much when you are using the BOND app, I run into it often with devices in routines. For example, I added the light on my kitchen fan to a group of downstairs lights. If I ask Alexa to turn off the downstairs lights, and the kitchen fan light is already off, it then turns on. This is because the fan light isn’t reporting to BOND that it is off, BOND isn’t able to tell Alexa that the light is already off, so Alexa tells BOND to issue a power action to the fan light, which then turns itself on instead of off. Again, this is a minor annoyance and something I expected might happen. For the convenience BOND has added to my life, I’ll deal with it.
Full Auto
Lately I’ve been obsessing over proactive automation rather than reactive automation. The difference is that I love being able to have my house react to things I do, like ask for lights to turn on or raise the heat if it’s especially windy outside, but I would prefer to not even have to think about it and have the house manage these things itself. With BOND’s IFTTT channel, I have taken a major step in that direction. Leveraging IFTTT’s integrations with other devices and services, I was able to quickly create applets to turn my fans on if certain events occurred. Using separate applets, I was able to create full automation that turns on all of my fans if the inside temperature reaches 72 degrees, or turns all of the fans on low if the air conditioner is running.
These just scratch the surface, though, and I plan to build out more actions that fully automate my ceiling fans. One action that comes to mind is to increase the speed of my bedroom fan if it gets hot in the room at night. Goodbye to nights of sticking one leg out of the covers in the middle of the night!
Overall
BOND is an amazing device occupying a space with little to no competition. While there is always room for improvement, as you can see by the addition of the LED light controls, the BOND development team is doing a fantastic job of listening to their customers and adding features. You might have read all of this and thought “This sounds amazing, but I don’t have RF remotes for my fans. Am I stuck paying hundreds per fan to add automation?” Nope. You can buy RF fan controllers for as little as $20 on Amazon, which is still a fraction of the cost of the alternatives available today!
BOND gives you the ability to upgrade existing devices without having to get into rewiring your house. It’s simple enough to set up that I would trust my parents to do it, and that’s saying something! For the price, you’re not going to find a cheaper or easier way to automate up to TWELVE devices.