AC on, vents remain closed even when room temp is above setpoint?
Now that it's getting hot here and AC on, I'm tracking Flair's for the first summer, winter seemed to work very well.
Per the Ecobee app and dashboard setpoint is 75 and AC is on, 4 rooms with ecobee sensors, 5 controlled vents, 6 uncontrolled vents, all room sensors read 76+, only one of the room vents are open due to back pressure, all bedrooms are above the setpoint, and vents are closed, not right.
(I did file a support ticket because the master bedroom was getting way colder than the other bedrooms and the other bedroom vents were closed, with ecobee averaging the temps the cold room will get colder and the hot rooms will get hotter. I'd expect the vents to open in the warmest room, not the coldest room, especially due to back pressure)
I'm wondering if this is caused by away mode, I do not use presence detection in ecobee, but the Flair portal seems to honor away mode.
Any ideas how to get rid of away mode, or other causes?
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Official comment
Hi Pieter Viljoen,
I see that one of our agents just responded to your support ticket earlier this morning.
We think that switching your back pressure priority algorithm will accomplish exactly what you are after.
Please let us know if you have any other questions about this via a reply to the support ticket thread so we can keep all our dialogue in one central location.
Thanks for being a valued Flair customer.
Regards,
The Flair Team
Comment actions -
For the community I'll share my concern here, support has been responsive to offer changing the back pressure algorithm, but has not yet addressed my concern about their described method of operation of the system, maybe I understood wrong, maybe there is a bug, maybe there is a config problem.
I use Ecobee as setpoint controller, have multiple comfort settings that change temperatures and use different room sensors during the day and night, do not use auto away or any presence sensing in Ecobee. Since the Flair back-pressure prioritize dump in active vs. not active rooms just complicates matters, I disable room activity and set all rooms manually to active. (just because there is no observed activity, and Flair is 5min delayed from Ecobee, does not mean I don't want good AC when reading/sleeping/typing/TV, etc. and no activity observed.)
In AC cooling mode, Flair keeps vents closed even when the room is +1deg above the setpoint, i.e. the room will not cool to reach the setpoint. Support confirmed that Flair uses a 1deg hysteresis "above" the setpoint (I assume in heating it is below, don't know about auto). I clearly see this, i.e. right now setpoint is 76, room temp is 77, Flair reports vents are closed, and vents will only open when room temp is "above 77".
This is very problematic for the AC will keep running without actually moving the monitored temperature, and causing room imbalance, exactly what Flair is supposed to prevent.
E.g. middle of the day schedule, setpoint is 76, 4 room sensors are active in Ecobee, room temps are 77, 77, 77, 78, 3 rooms have open vents and Flair reports vent will close when room falls below 76, but 4th room has two closed vents, and Flair reports vents will open when room temp is above 77. So what happens now is that Ecobee takes the average temp of the 4 rooms, and every room with an open vent gets colder than the setpoint, because Flair decided to keep one or more rooms at setpoint+1deg. As the number of rooms that have open vents decrease, because of Ecobee averaging the temperate delta between rooms increase.
E.g. at night schedule, setpoint is 73, only 3 bedrooms active, two rooms too hot at 74+ with closed vents, one room too cold at 71- because Ecobee uses room averages and Flair uses setpoint +1 before opening the vents.
In my opinion and understanding Flair should keep any vent open until setpoint has been satisfied, definitely not setpoint+1 that will never satisfy. This is arguably more complex as hysteresis and dead zone has to be accounted for based on just how Ecobee as setpoint controller decides to work, but closing vents before the setpoint-hysteresis is reached just causes problems.
I am open to being corrected in what I observe, or understand, or what support explained to me, but the setpoint+1 in AC mode does not make sense to me and causes problems.
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Hi Pieter Viljoen,
With rooms that are above set point the Smart Vents will open and help the room cool until the room is about 1 degree below the set point at which point the Smart Vents will shut to prevent further cooling.
It sounds like you have been in contact with a member of our support team and most (or all) of the above has been explained. If you have any other questions please contact us at support@flair.co
Regards,
The Flair Team
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James, yes, thank you.
The confusion stems from the UI showing current state only, and not reason, this is an opportunity to improve the UX.
To explain what I mean with the UX; AC on, room too hot, vent opens, when room reaches setpoint-1 vent closes, other rooms get more air, this room slowly heats up again, but vent will only open at setpoint+1, and that is what the UI says. This is confusing, as it looks like the vent should have remained open until setpoint-1, yet the UI says setpoint+1, but this was after temp has satisfied, on the rising edge.
As an alternate the UI could explain the hysteresis and dead-zone with maybe a little history graph, or showing swing temps, just some way of avoiding the user (my) confusion.
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Not from Flair, but I can confirm that the 0.5F hysteresis solved a few of my issues. The factory 1F is actually 2F - the vents open 1 degree above, close 1 degree below. The 0.5F hysteresis is actually 1F - vents open at 0.5F above, close 0.5F below, leading to a 1F swing.
Based on my short time with my vents so far, I'd highly recommend:
Reach out to Flair to have them switch you to the 0.5F hysteresis.Go into Ecobee installation settings (on the thermostat, not in tht app) and change the *Ecobee* hysteresis to 0.5F
Delete all your Ecobee schedules (you have to leave one, you can't remove them all)
Remove all remote sensors from the remaining Ecobee "Home" schedule, leaving only the thermostat itself in the comfort mode.
Change Ecobee hold setting to "Until I Change It"
Make Flair your set point controller
Rebuild all your schedules in Flair.
It's a pain in the butt, for sure. In addition, if you're the type to leave your Ecobee in "Auto" and let it switch between heat and cool, you now have to create *two* schedules, one for heat one for cool because no one in their right mind heats and cools their house to the same temperature year round. (Feature request, Flair!)
With these settings, everything should be on point. The only thing better is using Home Assistant and the Flair API to further dial in room occupancy, but that's outside the scope of what you're currently trying to accomplish.
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With auto-away now disabled (always active), and the hysteresis set to 0.5F by Flair, and I understand the UI quirkiness, things are working much better.
I did consider switching to Flair as setpoint controller, but I do use auto mode with different heating and cooling profiles and I have 5 different comfort settings using different sensors, so not something I was willing to struggle setting up.
I also use Home Assistant, with the Flair integration, but just for monitoring, with a mix of family being home and away I never found a reliable and valuable use for presence detection.
I've not changed the Ecobee hysteresis, may experiment. I had always wished, and many people asked, Ecobee to support sensor priorities vs. just averaging all active sensors and getting in a "thermal runaway" scenario as different rooms get colder and hotter at the same time while the average remains constant, Flair mostly solves this if rooms get sufficient airflow.
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Knowing that you use the Hass integration, I'll expand on my use case a bit.
Wife works from home
Big kids are in school 7a-3p M-F, in and out of the house with friends and obligations, and are at their mom's house every other weekend.
The little guy is in daycare 5 days a week, and is home 7 nights a week. His schedule can change due to daycare closings, illness keeping him home, etc. So a fairly set schedule but is subject to change.I've got schedules set in Flair to account for the constants. Our bedroom runs from 930p to 7a.
The baby's room runs every night from 7p to 7a.
The big kids rooms are set to Inactive 24/7Home Assistant takes care of the variables. Kids come home, Hass sets their rooms to active, and back to Inactive when they leave. The baby is home from daycare during the week, early/late nap etc - if his bedroom lights are on, Flair is active. Lights off, Flair inactive. We have a night light that's set to 1%, so whether the lights are on full blast or just the nightlight, flair gets 'notified' that he's in the room. I could go deeper and use my Coral TPU for presence detection on his crib cam but that level of tinkering is in the past (at the wife's pleading 😄)
Point of all that - go outside your comfort zone. Take screenshots before you modify anything. Technically you don't even need to delete the Ecobee schedules and comfort settings so long as you remove all the sensors from them and set indefinite hold.
This system is definitely more powerful than i expected. My only real wish is that they'd allow local polling/push. Cloud only leaves me a little concerned about reliability and solvency of the company taking the whole system down, but that's a concern regardless of whether I'm all in on API and schedules.
When I feel like spending the money to destroy one, I plan to buy another puck to dissect and attempt to flash custom firmware on.
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