The Winds Cannot Be Changed
Under the "boy they did that wrong" category. I imagine I'll have more of these to catalog, so I made it an honest-to-goodness category for this blog.
At my new apartment, I've got ceiling fans with built-in lamps in three rooms. In all the rooms, the fan is wired to a switch panel with two switches. One switch controls the power to the whole unit, fan blades and fan lamp. The other controls the power to some power outlet in the room.
That means if I want to change whether the lamp is on while leaving the fan on for circulation — a very common desire in the bedroom and in the living room (for tv watching and such) — then I have to reach up uncomfortably (they aren't all easy to reach) and pull the little chain that rubs against the lamp housing. I'm also nervous that this manipulation will put the fans out-of-balance if done often. I've already had two of the fans fixed/replaced because when out-of-balance they make an unacceptable whirr-whirr noise.
I may have to plug floor lamps into the switched sockets and leave off the fan lamps. But then I have to be careful not to actually turn off the floor lamp itself. I've got this setup in one room and I keep getting confused about where I turned the floor lamp off: the lamp itself, the wall switch, or both. Often turning off the floor lamp at the lamp's location is most convenient.
The place should have been wired so that one switch controls the fan blades and the other fan lamp. I asked the apt office to see if they could investigate if it can be done by re-wiring, conjecturing that the wires may already be in the walls as I desire as the place was built in 1997 and they should have foreseen this type of wiring situation. I've wired fans that way myself in a Habitat for Humanity house last summer, where the people who did the wall wiring had already set it up to work as I describe: one for blades, one for lamp. The apt office people reported back to me that they were told by maintenance that the wires were not in place and the wall would have to be opened to do it.