Why:
You have to reach up and pull the draw cord every time you want to turn the fan on/off. Also you have to cycle through all the speed levels to do so and you are never really quite sure if you have actually turned the fan off until it stops spinning. Also also, fans can often be in awkward places like over dinner tables or beds, making reaching them for the 5-15 seconds it takes to turn one off ,if you don’t have the speed-cycle and position memorized, even more irritating. Another annoying and even pretend dangerous situation is when the room is completely dark but the fan is on, which means that the fan light is turned off at the chain, so in order to turn on the light so you can do things, such as see, you have to sort of slowly wave your hand near where the fan should be, hoping you find the chain before you find the orbiting blades of death; also you feel like an idiot when you are doing this.(this might actually be the worst paragraph I have ever written)
To “fix” this problem it would be possible to have a relay switch wired into the fan, that reacts to the presence and absence of current in the following pattern:
On once- just lights
off-all off
on twice- lights and fan
off twice- fan on, lights off
etcetera
The downside of this is that the process of simply turning on the lights would become slightly more complicated which, depending on usage habits, may be more of a burden than its worth. One possibility would be an override switch/dangle-chain that could be activated during the summer when the fan will be used frequently and disabled in other seasons.
Of course you could just wire in a separate switch for the fan independent of the lights, but that would require wiring in a separate switch independent of the lights.
