No access to Flair tonight; API outage; Vents locked closed; No local control; Status page?
Tonight, Flair's servers appear to have gone down. The Flair app is unable to load, or if it occasionally loads it can't reach the servers for long. Meanwhile my internet connection is stable and fast. Presented with unable to load API errors or spinning loading indicators.
Is there a Flair status page? I found ecobee's at https://status.ecobee.com/, but they have no outages.
As far as I can tell, there is ZERO local fall-back when Flair's API goes down. Vents remain in whatever position they were in prior to the outage. ecobee can take back over and run my HVAC, but it obviously cannot open the vents. So it's pushing air into the wrong rooms and not able to cool the one room that needs to be cooled since its vents are closed.
I can't find any support articles about how to open the vents by hand. Do I need to unscrew them from the ceiling when this happens?
Is there really no way for some local control here? How hard is it to have the fallback of sending a local signal within my wifi network from phone to puck to vent? Or at least a fallback of the vents all opening when the pucks can't reach the API?
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Official comment
Hi Jake Grinsted, Seth Lampman & Conrad Zagarzazu,
We did have a brief outage on Saturday night/Sunday morning (5/20 & 5/21) due to scheduled maintenance.
This likely resulted in your Flair Gateway Pucks going offline and as a result, all Flair Smart Vents should have subsequently gone offline and opened.
I know Jake indicated some of his Smart Vents did not open. If this happened to anyone else please let us know with an email to support@flair.co
We expect that your systems were online and operating as usual by Sunday AM.
Regards,
The Flair Team
Comment actions -
Thanks James C. and team. What should we do when they don't open? Is that something you can share here publicly for those of us (like me) who go searching online for answers on what to do? It was so hard to find info about what to do in this situation where Flair has an outage.
To be clear, I do not fault you for having an outage - and I appreciate how quickly things came back online.
But I do think it's fair to ask for some transparency about what we are supposed to do with these (rather pricey!) vents in the event that you do suffer an outage. Or, for that matter, if any of your providers or the internet itself suffer an outage.
Could you help us know what steps to take? Obviously emailing support in the middle of the night when the Flair team is quite possibly scrambling to rectify an API outage is understandably not going to help us solve the immediate issue of closed vents.
Many thanks,
Jake
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Yeah some sort of notification when it's down would be helpful.
My vents were stuck in the last position they were in. But... I use Homeassistant and have the plugin for flair. What I did find out is that I could manually open and close the events with homeassistant during the outage. Normally (with HA) if I manually open and close vents flair will override it and undo whatever vents I manually control. During the outage I could at least do things manually (the flair app couldn't do this)
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Welcome to one of several reasons why many of us are not buying into Flair. No local control and if you lose connectivity to the cloud for any reason they should all go wide open which is absolutely not desirable for many of us. If they go under, you'll be stuck with a lot of expensive paperweights. We have had a thread going for years now that Flair has ignored for about as long where we have asked for things that would make their system far more robust. But crickets as usual
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I've seen that thread and Flair doesn't seem to be ignoring it but they do seem to lack direction, and, perhaps motivation.
I agree that if Flair goes out of business - and given how long it took them to just get a second vent size out, I certainly wouldn't rule that out (any major manufacturer could step in and push them out by simply supporting more vent sizes at launch) - then we customers will be screwed and there will just be a lot of eye rolls coming from Flair.
https://support.flair.co/hc/en-us/community/posts/360068682731-What-happens-if-there-is-no-internet- -
Wow, I was about to buy a whole bunch of smart vents from Flair. Knowing that these will be trash, if the company goes out of business, made be not to buy into this. I will build my own motorized dampers with esp32, instead of dealing with cloud or a company not willing to provide local control over the device I pay for.
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Hi Senthil Babu,
Thank you for your interest in Flair and the feedback here in our forum. We truly value all customer feedback and opinions.
I understand your concern regarding our products.
We recently celebrated our 10-year anniversary and have a large installed base (over 20,000 devices) that we support. If you decide to go a different route or to design and build your own motorized dampers that is amazing and we wish you all the best.
Regards,
The Flair Team
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Thanks for the response. I wish your company a big success for many years to come. But I don't want my home to be dependent on the grid. My Internet may go down due to various reasons. I am not sure why it is so hard for companies to provide a local API? I wish there is an easier way instead of me doing a full diy solution just to be independent of the grid.
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