Vent-Puck range 10 ft?
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Official comment
Flair's device-to-device ad hoc network uses radio signals for communication. Range is a factor of the construction and layout of your home. Also, large metal objects can block and/or interfere with the signal. Customers have experienced interference and blocked signals from appliances, large mirrors and a piano.
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I have several farther than that. Some through open space, maybe 20 feet. Some though multiple walls, maybe 15 feet. These are in a finished basement with 7 vents spread across 4 rooms plus a bathroom and a single puck in the central room. (I should buy 2 more pucks for more detailed control, waiting for a puck only sale.)
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In this case, there is nothing but air and the ducts, does the duct material block your radio signal?? In the attached picture, when I set the gateway on the table at 7 ft away, it stays connected. When I move it to resting on the outlet which is 10 ft away, it loses signal. Is this normal?? It is not the outlet itself that is causing the problem, I tried hanging it over the copper pipe above the outlet, and it still lost signal until I moved it to within 7 ft again.
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Thanks for the image! Yes, you’ve got a lot of exposed duct material there and it looks like other exposed metal, so I’d say yes. If it’s a Gateway Puck, the metal might be interfering with the WiFi signal to the Puck which would also make it appear offline. Check the Puck display for the WiFi connection icon. The more bars, the stronger the WiFi signal. If it has an X in it, then there’s no WiFi connection.
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The wifi signal is fine as the OTHER flair vent is still connected. I labeled where the other Flair vent is in the picture. It is not the wifi, it is the signal between the gateway puck and the vent that keeps dropping, If I move the puck closer to one, the other one falls off, but I always have at least one of them connected so it is not the wifi signal..
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I would email support, it's a much better response than a forum posting gets. I had a vent that didn't want to open/close correctly, and support sent me a replacement vent and return shipping label to send the one I had back. They seemed to genuinely want to determine why it broke, not just solve my problem. All in all, with 9 vents and 3 pucks, it's working fine. I should have bought 5 pucks though.
In my basement, I have 7 vents and 1 puck in the middle of the basement. It's a finished space with partition walls everywhere. It would be like having the puck back on that shelf past the filing cabinet with blue towel in your picture, or a little farther, only there's a wall, closet interior, wall between the puck and one of the vents, at least 15 feet distance, with no issues. My other 2 pucks are both on the second floor, so two floors between them and the basement vents, in case they were picking up the communication instead.
Is your puck set up as a gateway with WiFi too, or counting on another connection to drive that? All of mine are plugged in, configured as gateways, it seemed easier. If the puck is losing WiFi that might show up as offline too. There's probably some troubleshooting they can help with on where the issue is, between which 2 devices.
Edit - That second picture makes me think you have a bad puck. I would expect anywhere in that small room to work between a puck and those 2 vents.
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Matt, what you are describing is basically what I eventually want to have: controlling 7 vents in the basement (about 1,000 sq ft). I thought it would work with one gateway puck but it is not cooperating so far. Next step (next year) would be to do the upstairs (2,000 sq ft) with another 10 or 12 vents and maybe an additional puck or 2 set to gateway as well.
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Before you get to far, count all the vents you have in the entire system. Flair will only close a third of the total vent count at one time. In my case, I have 9 Flair vents, and 28 total vents, meaning all of them can be closed at the same time. Using each puck as a zone, I have a bedroom with 1 vent and puck, bedroom with 1 vent and puck, and basement with 7 vents and 1 puck. That's why I wish I had 2 more pucks, to split the basement into 3 zones. I don't have Flair integrated with the thermostat at all. It's set with it's own remote sensors to drive the house to the desired temperature with the vents providing limiting to the rooms that get to hot/cold. I could integrate them, but don't see an advantage in my case. There's only one zone for our entire house's system.
So far, a year in on the first 2 vents, and 6 months on the later 7, everything has been working well. My thermostat tries to heat/cool the single large zone, the vents close/open to limit the areas that would otherwise be over driven.
There's no sense buying vents for rooms that will always be left open. When I first set up, I randomly put in 26 vents, but hadn't really counted them. With just 2 Flair, anything over 6 was good. Once I got to 9 Flair vents, it wouldn't close all of them, which was bad. I did the actual count, and it came out right (I would have put in 28 anyway to get them all to shut, but this way it was the truth too), and all 9 vents can close at the same time.
That picture really does make me think you have a defective puck radio. Since you have 2 vents, and it works with whichever is closer, it's not likely the vent, since it would have to be both of them.
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I sent the picture to engineering and they confirmed that all that exposed metal is going to interfere with the signal. They suggested rotating the vent(s) 180 so that the side with the light strip is toward the Puck.
Yes, writing into support is going to get you faster results.
I’ll convert this post to a ticket.
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