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We have 3 Atomberg Gorilla Smart+ ceiling fans and I have bypassed the regulator on their specific instructions.

Can you please post the picture of the schematic diagram that shows the use of a conventional regulator with the fan? I could not find the product manual online.

Guys, in the market for a cordless handheld vacuum cleaner. We already have a Dyson V8+ Animal for the last 2 years, and very happy with it. While the V8 is great, I am loathe to spend 36K during these times!

Now looking for a second one with the following use case:

1. To be used primarily by the maid.
2. Speed will be at lower setting (usually) so as to cover the max floor area.
3. Needs to collect dog hair and dust well.
4. Should be equally good for tile and carpeted floors.
5. It HAS to be a cordless handheld so no reccos about the wired wheeled ones please

Zeroing in on these:
Karcher VC 4S: We have a Karcher pressure washer + wired vacuum. Very dependable solid engineering. Warranty is 1 year usually
https://www.amazon.in/gp/product/B08...RP0RINJW&psc=1

Black & Decker: Have never used their products in India so unsure of quality and service support
https://www.amazon.in/gp/product/B08...G9ONZD7S&psc=1

Eufy (Anker) Homevac: Have heard good things about them in the US, but again never used their products in India so unsure of quality and service support
https://www.amazon.in/gp/product/B08...HZ5JCQ18&psc=1

Any thoughts on the above or any more solid brands/products I may have missed?

My understanding is also that a BLDC would not work with a normal regulator but i must admit there is only so much i know. Normal celling fans are capacitor driven single phase 230V AC direct fans. The capacitor is used to create a phase difference between the stator and starter coils. The speed control is done through a regulator which varies the series resistance there by altering the terminal voltage and hence speed. Later versions came up with some kind of frequency control regulators which were used to vary speed but normal ceiling reacted badly to such regulators.

BLDC fans, internet university says, are DC (typically 24VDC) motors which uses a three wire PWM circuitry to vary the speed. Lots of circuits on the net for those who are interested. These are microcontroller driven and uses probably a normal remote to vary speed. The advantage being that they may be noise less and a PITA when it comes to maintenance. Anyways I don't have these at home so my knowledge is limited. Whole world is going the remote way, why leave out the fan?.

Exactly. In BLDC, the frequency is varied to control the speed. With conventional regulators, a series resistance is added to the circuit. In Triac based regulators (this could be the case with those modular switches), the phase angle is controlled to vary speed.

As both Triac based and resistance based regulators will drop the voltage reaching the controller in the BLDC, it will not be able to control the speed using only the frequency. One way this could work is to keep the BLDC fan at it's highest speed setting and using a conventional regulator.

The BLDC fan would first convert AC to DC and then re-convert this DC to variable frequency AC. This could work with a triac based control, but with the conventional series resistance approach, this will still waste power in the series resistance and will beat the purpose of a BLDC fan for efficiency.

Having said that, they may have come up with some solution to this problem to use conventional regulators to work with the BLDC. That is why I want to have a look at the manual and the schematics to understand.

@NPV, though you may be able to control the fan with conventional regulator, my recommendation would be to either bypass or keep the conventional regulator at its highest setting and control the speed of the fan using the remote control.

I don't think you need to worry about damaging the fan. With the microcontroller in place, it is just sensing the position of the regulator from the phase angle - I don't think the power through the wall regulator is fed directly to the motor - it likely harvests the choppy AC power and converts it to DC before it is fed to the BLDC part. In my skimming of the TI document above, I see that you can send it a "Morse code" speed setting by turning the power switch on and off. The miracles of mass produced microcontrollers! Who woulda thunk!

There isn't anything different/interesting in that diagram, just shows a normal regular being connected in series with the switch which is what has always been done with fan regulators. I will post the picture soon.

EDIT:here you go, look at Installation Instruction #9 and also the bottom right side note about Regulator usage
*I think they made the manual a generic one to cover the older and newer models that don't support/support regulators because I did not see anywhere during the product selection/purchase path where they mentioned about the fan working/not working with normal regulators.


Pardon the bad quality of pic taken hurriedly with a phone camera :)

Just a simple question before I close, If the regulator is set at 4 and the remote sets the speed at 2, which setting does the microcontroller take?.

PS : Still to come : " Alexa , set the fan at 4 and ignore my husband's commands".

The text specifically says "Superfan regulator models only", and the regulator also is mentioned as "Superfan regulator". So, this means, there are some models that come with regulators, but those will be from Superfan itself. If you have a non-regulator type Superfan, then you cannot connect to a regular regulator.

It may still work, but you may not be enjoying the efficiency to the fullest.

My guess is that the fan draws power from the line, via the regulator. The regulator does not directly control the motor, the microcontroller does. The motor has power from the regulator line, AND it is sufficient to drive the fan motor at full speed even at the lowest setting (except off or zero), so the microcontroller decides the speed based on the latest instructions - if you set it to speed 3 via the wall regulator, it will run the fan at speed 3, next you use the remote to set it to speed 5 - the microcontroller obliges. Now you can again set the wall regulator to speed 1 and it is now the current speed of the fan. The regulator is just a wired speed control remote which also happens to transport energy!

Need recommendation on a Digital Weighing Scale.

I checked Amazon briefly and found the following to be impressive:
1. Dr Trust 509 : Link
2. HealthSense Fitdays BS 171 : Link
3. ActiveX Savvy: Link

Looking forward to some recommendations based on the real world usage/experience that people have on this thread.

I am using this https://www.amazon.in/gp/product/B08...?ie=UTF8&psc=1 since last 3 months and I am quite happy with it's performance (but i still don't know how to check whether the numbers shown are accurate?).

I have been using this for a couple of years. Along with weight, it does Body Composition analysis. The main reason for going for this model is it syncs with their app and later it draws the trend graphs. They have an option to sync with Fitbit & Google Fit. But syncing with Google Fit has stopped for a year.

PS: I was looking for MI Scale - https://www.mi.com/in/mi-body-composition-scale/. It was out of stock for few months and I went for the above model.

I bought an Omron scale.

Had an old-fashioned mechanical scale for many years. It survived immersion in the Chennai flood --- but all the numbers washed off the dial! My wife was disappointed that I got a digital scale: it doesn't do anything the old one didn't do, except use batteries, and the old one could be checked for zero, and always just worked.

I have an MI scale plus body composition machine for about 2 years now. Does the job well, although the usage is once or twice a month only.