Flair not working with Ecobee Smart Recovery?

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Yi Lin

I just installed two Flair vents/one puck to integrate with my Ecobee. My ecobee schdeule is 67 degree for sleep and 71 for daytime starting at 7AM. I noticed this morning that when Ecobee initiated Smart Recovery around 6:40AM, two Flair vents stayed closed until 7AM, causing the temperatures in rooms without Flair vents to rise higher then set point. So when vents reopened at 7AM, ecobee no longer called for heat and those two rooms stayed cold.

I am wondering how Flair will works with Ecobee Smart Recovery. Even if I have all smart vents, they will just stay closed until the next schedule, which will forfeit the whole purpose of Smart Recovery.

Thanks!

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    James Clarke

    Hi Yi,

    I have an ecobee thermostat as well and I personally decided not to use their Smart Recovery option for heating or cooling.  I have it disabled for both.

    As you are probably aware, Smart Recovery kicks on heating or cooling cycles ahead of schedule to try to have the house or zone up to the scheduled setpoint at the time that scheduled comfort setting begins.  This sounds great in theory, and it may be great for many folks, but in my particular situation what it did was start to cool the house before we were upstairs for bed (i.e. before the Sleep Comfort Setting was scheduled to take place) and it made the living room downstairs much colder than desired from 9:30 to 10 pm while we were downstairs in the Living Room binge-watching Ted Lasso. 

    I think you can solve this issue in one of two ways.

    1. You could disable Smart Recovery and just know that the ecobee will call for Heat and Cool at the start of your Comfort Settings as desired.
    2. If you wish to keep Smart Recovery enabled you can create a Flair schedule to cause your Smart Vents to open earlier and be more in step with the actual heating and cooling cycles in your system.  As an example, you would create an "Event" in your Flair schedule for 6:30 am instead of 7 am, and in this event, you would establish a setpoint that will cause the Smart Vents to open at that time.  Instead of the 67 setpoint for a given room that comes from the thermostat the room should have a 71 setpoint so the Smart Vents operate under the assumption you want it to be 71 in the room at 6:40 am even though the thermostat schedule says you don't want 71 until 7 am. 

    If you have any further questions about this Yi please contact us at flair.co/support so we can address your questions in a timely manner.

    Thank you for being a great Flair customer and an active member of our User Community! 

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    Yi Lin

    Hi James,

    Thank you very much for the suggestions. I did already have a support ticket open for this issue.

    The smart recovery feature is important to me because we have a 2-stage furnace so ecobee calls for only stage-1 heat during the smart recovery and the temperature change is smoother. If I disable the feature, the abrupt temperature change will force ecobee to call for stage-2 heat.

    I don't know how much info Ecobee API provides, but I think if Flair puck can read from Ecobee the "Smart Recovery" status and the next scheduled set point it should be able to accommodate the changes.

    As for creating a schedule on Flair, I think I read somewhere in FAQ it is better to use either ecobee's or Flair's, but not both, to avoid the conflict?

    So far I am pretty happy with Flair, so if the smart recovery can be handled, I am planning to replace all six vents with Flair smart vents.

    Thanks!
    Yi

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