Home with wide temperature spread
My house can have a 10-degree or more spread between the upstairs and downstairs rooms. How does Flair manage this when deciding how long to keep the heat running in order to fulfill set points on individual vents? For example, if the downstairs is set to 68 but the air temp is currently 66, but some upstairs vents have to be open due to back pressure protect, and the temperature upstairs is 78, will Flair ignore the drastically over-temp pucks upstairs and keep the heat running anyway in order to hit 68 downstairs? Or does it balance these set points somehow?
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Hi Chris,
Does this same phenomenon occur during the summer? Is your second floor also warmer than your first floor? If so, you have a combination of scenarios:
When heating, too little airflow to the downstairs, too much airflow to the upstairs
When cooling, too much airflow to the downstairs, too little airflow to the upstairs
That will require Pucks and Vents in all rooms to circulate the air for maximum comfort seasonally.
For more information, see this chart that explains the airflow scenarios Flair solves: Airflow Scenarios.
To answer your question about back pressure protection, Flair will prioritize closing Smart Vents in Active rooms first. You can use a schedule to set rooms to Inactive when you're not using them so Flair concentrates on Active rooms. These articles explain more:
Set Rooms to Active or Inactive
Here's a convenient link to get started on ordering:
All the best,
Finn
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We have a heat-only central heat system. Even with Flair pucks and vents in every room, it can't close enough upper-floor vents to get enough airflow to the bottom floor to make up for the drastic temperature difference.
I've gotten around this problem sort of by having the Nest use a remote temperature sensor located downstairs for part of the day. However, Nest doesn't let you customize what time of day it uses the remote sensor, which causes several other problems I won't get into. It would be better if I could let Flair control the Nest based on which room is the coldest, but I also don't want a situation where the upstairs rooms get run up to 80F because of cold rooms downstairs plus back pressure protect, so my question still remains: how does the Flair set point algorithm deal with two wildly different puck temperatures? Will it keep running the heat until ALL rooms hit their set points, or is it smart enough to notice that it's causing some pucks to go way over temperature and balance the needs of all the rooms?
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I completely empathize with your question Chris Tipton-King - it would be nice if Flair could answer this, it's a real problem and one which I (and I'm sure many others) share and I would like to get a good understanding of how the Flair system in concert with the Thermostat system handles this. Obviously that's why we're considering this system in the first place :)
I did read that Flair limits the number of valves it will close based on how many (incl non smart registers) that you have in your system during initial set-up. So you could artificially augment the total number to work around that (i.e. say you have 12 - Flair will only close 4 max at any time; however if you say you have 18 (12 'real' and 6 'imaginary' ) then it could actually close 6 valves - but you would have to be taking that on your own recognizance of possible jeopardy, unless you chose to install a bypass damper between the supply and return. (these are not difficult to install if you have access) These can be 'dumb' and simply responding to a weighted arm when the pressure exceeds the set-point to open the bypass path.But I'd still like to understand what actually happens with the system as-designed in the scenario you have described.
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