Potential Buyer Question
My Thermostat is on the Main floor. My Master bedroom is upstairs and gets really hot. To combat that, I turn the AC up on the Main floor. Consequently, my Living room, Dining room/kitchen are freezing and its still hot upstairs. I have a total of 10 vents; 5 on each floor.
If I understand correctly, I will need 10 vents and maybe 3 pucks (Bedroom, Livingroom, Kitchen? I keep the vents in the 2 bathrooms closed all year long. Will I still be able to do that or do I need to add pucks just for that?
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Official comment
Hi L. MacDonald,
It sounds like you've got low airflow to the upstairs when the AC is on.
You'll replace the Vents downstairs with Flair Smart Vents, and these will close when the set point is reached to redirect more cool air upstairs.
For installation, upstairs you'll need temperature sensors to inform Flair when to close the Vents downstairs. These can be Flair Pucks or an ecoboee or Honeywell WiFi-connected smart thermostat (or their remote sensors).
Downstairs, you'll need Smart Vents and a temperature sensor in every room with Smart Vents.
Please see these articles for more information on Puck requirements:
How many Flair Pucks do I need?
How many Gateway Pucks do I need?
You may also want to consider what happens in the wintertime when heating. If the upstairs is always too warm, regardless of season, then you'll need Flair Smart Vents upstairs as well. Those will close to prevent overheating when the heat is on. Check out this article on airflow scenarios:
Do I need to replace all my vents?
All the best,
Finn
Comment actions -
It depends on exactly what you want to do.
Out of the box, Flair only wants to close at max one third of the vents. With 5 and 5, you'll want to close half the vents it sounds like. If you're fine doing that, you can fib to the Flair setup that you have 15 not 10 vents, and it'll close 5. Risk to closing to many vents is all on you.
I think you could solve your issue with 1 puck and 5 vents for the main floor. Don't integrate the Flair system with the thermostat. Just set the puck to a degree or two warmer than the thermostat. The main floor puck will see that it's cold enough first and close the vents to the main floor. The thermostat will keep running since it's not cold enough yet. That will dump more air out to the upstairs. The upstairs will continue to leak air down the stairs as it cools until the main floor thermostat stops. That should limit the main floor from getting to overly cool. If air cannot flow from upstairs to down, only leakage air through the closed vents would get through to stop the thermostat. If the set points are far enough apart, that may never happen.
It's not perfect, but then 1 cooling system for the two floors isn't perfect either. You'll need to play with the two set point values too.
This doesn't do a lot of things though, that's why it depends on what you really want to do. This deals only with a cold upstairs. It doesn't deal with if in the winter, the upstairs is hot and you need to limit heat there and get more on the main floor. Or maybe the main floor overheats too. It doesn't let you have a different set point in every room. It doesn't let you use a different set point in every room to turn the system on or off.
Which all gets back to, it depends on exactly what you want to do and what capabilities you want from the entire system within the mechanical limitations.
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