What happens if there is no internet?
So I am looking to invest in smart vents but I have seen many tech companies come and go in the past 10 years. Is there any ability with Flair to operate in an "off grid" mode if internet were lost?
And if, God forbid, Flair went out of business what would happen to the functionality of the smart vents and the required Pucks I invested in?
I have a large house and I would likely be looking at several thousand dollars to make the full conversion, the fact that everything is cloud based makes me quite nervous to make such an investment in a relatively new company.
Is there any consideration to having at least a base "offline" mode of operation that would allow the system to still be functional?
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I just made two projects public. One is a 3d printed MQTT smart vent and the other is a system that brings together a thermostat, temperature sensors, and smart vents using MQTT to make your home more comfortable. Currently, other than to install/update these technologies, internet is not required.
https://github.com/TonyBrobston/mqtt-hvac-vent-control
https://github.com/TonyBrobston/yet-another-smart-vent
This is the least amount of work I could do to get these systems functioning, so it's a bit involved to get them up and running; this will get easier over time, I've listed future features that address most of these potential pain points. If you have any questions, please create an issue in the appropriate project and I'll respond as I have time.
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I have been using Ecovent throughout my house since 2016. Ecovent was later acquired by Keen Home, which seems to have vanished recently (email is bouncing, phone messages are not returned, website has disabled purchases). Fearing that my vents may soon become bricks, I took a look at Flair, but unfortunately Flair vents appear to be even more dependent on the cloud than Ecovent vents, and more likely to be bricked if Flair disappears. I won't make that mistake a second time.
My Ecovent system has usually worked well. Unlike Flair, the Ecovent hub is designed to continue automatically opening & closing vents (via custom radio) and controlling the Zen thermostat (via ZigBee) and connecting with the phone app (via LAN) even while the internet is down, and that has worked. But occasionally (on the order of once a year) the hub has stopped working (or become very flaky) for days until the company fixed whatever broke, which is very frustrating because there is no way to manually control the vents. Ecovent/Keen would never tell me what went wrong, but it had to be bugs/outages in their cloud service or buggy code updates to the hub. This is why I won't invest in any more HVAC equipment that connects to anything outside my house. My furnace and thermostat never misbehave and never change unless I change them. Only the cloud-connected components (the Ecovent hub, and the Sensi thermostat before I replaced it with the Zen) have ever caused problems.
Bottom line: If Flair would like to offer an automatic vent product with no connection outside the house, I would be very interested, otherwise I'm not at all.
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I have Keen vents and don't use a hub. My Hubitat connects to them through zigbee. So if you have a home automation system you may be able to connect to them directly.
Unfortunately with the Keen vents I've done everything I can but they still chew through batteries about every 30-45 days. So the amount of vents returned may have been their downfall.
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At that point, I'm surprised people don't wire up a simple circuit to power the vents externally. I had seen issues with Keen 6 months to a year ago and suspected what Adam has confirmed. I don't know whether Flair is much farther behind, which is why I can't in good faith hop on board despite them having what I would consider the best package out there right now for residential smart vents. Residential automation controls severely lag behind industrial solutions and PLC controlled systems
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For my system I've got 18 awg FPLP (Fire Power Limited Plenum) power/ground running through my ducting. I've got a 24V15A Power Supply Transformer with an enclosure/cover that I designed and 3D printed to use DC barrel connections.
I took what I think is called Poly Line and a grocery bag; I tied the line on to the grocery bag, capped every vent outlet except the line I was running, turned the blower on manually through my thermostat's testing interface, then stuck the grocery bag through an inspection panel of my ducting, above my furnace. In some cases the grocery bag would make it all the way to the end of the run and I could grab it from the vent side. In other cases I used a fish tape, pushed it down the duct from the vent side, and then physically rotated the fish line 5-10 times, which caused the end to wrap around the grocery bag, and I was able to pull the fish tape out to ultimately get ahold of the poly line. I then attached my power/ground wire and pulled it through. Admittedly, some of the runs took 5 minutes, some took 2 hours; by the end of working out a good technique, it wasn't horrible and I think on average I could probably do one every 20 minutes. This was also on a three-level-split (with 11 runs; 3 in the basement, 4 on the main floor, and 4 upstairs), so... with two-story houses, I don't know what to expect. I would probably just run wiring through the ducting for the basement and first floor, then power the upstairs on the nearest outlet.
I just figured I'd share my experience incase anyone else is contemplating.
Also, the stuff I posted above does not require an internet connection for regular operation. I realize it's a DIY thing, at least for now... and it's certainly not polished. It is almost all open source, so if it takes off, there will likely be a community behind it. Is that better or worse than a corporation? I know my opinion, but that's clearly subjective.
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Great technique, Anthony! And a very similar practice to what electricians may use to pull jetline through conduit. I'm all for what you've done! It's ironic that this topic is getting traction on a commercial product's medsage board, but they've been ignoring us this long so why not? 😜
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So tonight, Flair's servers appear to have gone down. API is non-responsive, while my internet connection is fine. The Flair app is unable to load, or if it occasionally loads it can't reach the servers for long.
I searched for other people suffering from this and found this thread.
I think a major reason for needing LOCAL fall-back is for when THIS happens! I'm powerless over my own vents because Flair's servers are chocking.
I can't even be frustrated that the API is struggling - I totally understand how hard it is to keep things up and running at 100% - but I AM frustrated that NOTHING works locally. As in, I CANNOT EVEN OPEN MY VENTS. And I can't find any support articles about how to open the vents by hand. So do I need to unscrew them from the ceiling?
I hope this post helps others see how terrible it can be to ignore requests for local functionality.
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I am now at a point where I need smart vents, and I took a look here to see if local control was enabled, and it has not after years of requests and now server outages are showing why it needed.
I also tells me flair does not care about that market at all.
funny enough I am looking at Anthony Brobston project and since I have a and ender 5 plus, I just need to source the parts and edit the stl's to include fans and get controlling them worked out and I will have Smart Vents with Booster Fans, and I can run the cable on the outside and through walls and use mastic to seal where I enter beside the vents when needed.
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Flair has shown they have no interest in making their design more robust with local control fallback. This thread has been going on for years with no responses from Flair in quite some time aside from "we are financially solvent" (as if a company would be honest and tell you if they weren't). The way things are you'll be left with expensive paperweights in your ceiling/floor if they go under. Sorry, but using their smart vents to balance airflow doesn't work all that well if they all go wide open when their service goes down and you can't manually control
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Jake Grinsted The failure mode you describe is even worse than expected! If your vents can be stuck in the closed position when their servers have issues too, that in my opinion is worse than their described behaviour of them supposedly being all opened when there is a loss of connectivity!
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Flair Customer Support Any update on a possible local bridge? Or maybe even official local home-assistant software? Having to rely on the cloud to relay commands for the vents leads to large amounts of control lag where I live.
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Open source software that runs on any PC (for example written in .Net to avoid cross platform issues) is all it would take to satisfy this request. I don't think it would take much on Flair's end.
You could set it up to have the Flair vents talk to the home server and let the server setup part be on the user. No need for Flair to create a set top box or whatever of its own.
My suspicion is that this would not take much hardware from the user, maybe even a Raspberry Pi could run the API and just sit on the local network and control the vents.
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Hi Nick, Kruse Ludington,
We are aware of the demand for a local API and are tracking demand for it. I have added your thoughts to this internal ticket.
We can't guarantee when or if this will be implemented but when it is we will reach out to make you aware.
Regards,
The Flair Team
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Same, sign me up for being interested in Local API support.
It should be clear by now there is interest. This is the most active thread on the entire Flair foums and has the most upvotes as well.
Go to any Home Automation forum and you will see hordes of people actively steering people away from devices that are cloud-based and towards local control (it's the right way to do things) because too many people have been burned by cloud-only devices failing for one reason or another. Even if that is NEVER a problem for Flair, it actively prevents people from buying into the ecosystem.
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I've kept a browser tab open on the Flair page since Autumn and was __just__ about to click the 'buy' button on 9 vents and 4 pucks (because this seems like such a better solution than adding zone control to my Carrier system)....then I thought to research cloud dependency. Soooo glad I found this thread. As an early Wink user (anybody want to buy a Wink Relay or three?), there's no way I'd ever go back to a cloud dependent system again. Guess I'll be spending time in the attic installing zone dampers (sigh).
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CW Dillon I hear you 1,000%. BTW I have 10 Flair Vents and only 1 puck, so you might want to consider - if you ever do purchase them - to reduce the puck count, especially if you can centralize the location of one or more of them.
I did a lot of digging, and finally decided to break down and just buy them as they are the only really viable option around. I am considering buying another one just for experimental purposes to make it local only (with an ESP32 or ESP8266 or whatever), and then once that works perfectly - modify the others to do the same.
I am controlling mine all through Home Assistant and it works great - they only open if someone is in the room and the heat, cold or fan is blowing (backpressure is never any issue in my setup)... So the days of an overly hot or cold room is long gone I am in an old home (with 1930's technology insulation if you know what I mean) :-)
Thoughts? Has anyone else on this forum made "Flair Localization" attempt? Because this vendor obviously isnt....?
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I saw the new Bridge in the app.
2 things:
1. Is this to allow offline functionality?
2. The description is confusing. It says a central ac system requires the Bridge. But it just came out and my system works without it... -
Chris Moschini Chris Knabenshue
See my response in the other thread. It seems to be a case of "needs to be reworded". Your system works without it because you are using a puck as a gateway.
You can think of the bridge as a more "powerful" gateway - more powerful as in its radio has better coverage, for connection to the vents, when compared to using a puck as a gateway. For current users, if you are experiencing issues with vents losing their connection to your puck due to the puck being too far away, getting a bridge can help as its greater coverage is likely to get rid of your connectivity issues.
Regarding offline functionality: No. Getting a bridge doesn't enable offline control. The bridge is like a gateway puck, but without the temp sensor.
Whether local control can be enabled in the future: potentially? I don't have any insight into what Flair has on the roadmap - I haven't looked deep enough into the hardware of the puck or the bridge, but perhaps the SOC used for the bridge gives them room to plan to include a local API in the future. That isn't to say that the Puck's hardware is the current roadblock for a local API - it could very well be capable, but, understandably, allocating business resources to a local API at the moment isn't the top priority. -
I just bought a bunch of Keen vents because local control isn't a thing with Flair. I didn't _want_ to buy a bunch of used vents from a now-defunct company, but I have zero interest in purchasing hardware that relies on the cloud. These vents are working just fine entirely on a local Zigbee setup. I have been burned on cloud IoT providers several times and HVAC control is something that needs to work without internet connectivity. No amount of 'we are a solvent company don't worry about it' is going to change my or many others' opinions on that.
Please just implement local MQTT on the hub if you aren't going to expose the vents over Zigbee or Z-wave.
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