Feature Request: Partially Opened Vents
It seems like Flair is an incomplete product. I see that the vents are either 100% open, or 100% closed. But, that's not how AC vents normally work - normally you manually adjust them to a specific angle, which both balances the flow of air and redirects the air in the room.
It seems like Flair Engineers haven't figured out how to determine when a Flair vent should be open by how much, but, the hardware is capable of angles besides 0% and 100%. I'd like the ability to manually set a default open angle for each vent while we wait for Flair software to catch up someday. That way each vent could have:
Closed
Open
Max
Where Open is an angle I can adjust as I get to know my home's airflow needs. It might drastically reduce how often the vents need to open and close just to balance the house out. I very much see the benefit of vents opening and closing in more rare situations, like everyone gathering in one room. But most of the time the house needs the same static level of cooling and a static opening angle would be better than a rolling cycle of opens and closes.
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Official comment
Thanks for writing in.
I want to clarify the comment Viet made - Flair Smart Vents can be set to half open when the home is in manual mode or when the specific room the Smart Vent is assigned to is set to Inactive. When a room is active and the home is in Auto mode our Smart Vents are designed to open or close fully.
In many cases, the "Half Open" setting of the Flair Smart Vent won't actually result in a 50% drop in the airflow to the room - there is not a direct correlation.
We have had others request the ability to specify the degree to which Smart Vents open and close. I would be happy to formally submit your suggestion to our engineers as a Feature Request. Please note that feature requests are prioritized by the company for inclusion in the product and that a timeline for implementation cannot be guaranteed.
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@rich
If you have a temp sensor puck in each room you have a flair vent, it can automatically self open/close according to the temperatures set for each room.
If the room has reached temperature, it essentially should close and allow other rooms to cool or heat until targeted temperature.
If controlled manually, it has closed, half open, fully open.
I already had temperature sensors from Nest but Flair never built out integration to them so I control my vents manually. Not all vents sizes are supported so there's that issue as well. Overall, this system isn't as good as it should and could be in theory.
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I agree here with Viet. This was not clear before I brought the product. You have either open, 50% or closed. Closed isn't even a real option because the vent makes a horrific howling noise when it is fully closed. I chose to try Flair out because you had the vent size I needed, where as Keen needed an adapter. I'm extremely disappointed, this is a huge missing feature and this OP being 8 months old, it's clear you don't value customer feedback. At this point, I will be uninstalling the vent and going with Keen for the remainder of the house.
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I want to add my voice to this and also to say that I want to be able to control the percent open or closed using the slider. Why is it just closed or just half way or just open? This product was purchased in order to replace an existing register which has not one (air flow) but two (air deflection direction) purposes. I want to deflect the air exactly as I see fit and this is not something that can be automated or preordained by an engineer somewhere. Please make it do what we are asking for instead of what you think it should do. The hardware is already a continuously variable setup. The app has a slider. Just make it work intuitively. Or, open the API on the vent and I will write it myself. Should take about 1 hour.
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I was disappointed in that the Flair vents aren’t more dynamic. Basically they open for any room that needs heat/cooling, then close when that rooms thermostat indicates they desired temperature.
The challenge is the noise associated with a closed vent. When calling for heat, my bedroom vent will close very quickly (if it even opens at all) because most of the heat is needed in the downstairs. But rather than opening to 25% and allowing my bedroom temperature to raise at approximately the same speed as the downstairs, it will open for about 25% of the cycle, then close ... and it sounds like a jet engine is taking off.
There really isn’t a reason the vent ever needs to close to 100%. In the winter I’ve always found that covering about 75% of the vent will stabilize the temperature so the bedroom and downstairs temperature remains constant. Likewise in the summer closing the downstairs vents about 75% forcing more cool air upstairs also seems to keep the temperature stable. The only reason I decided to try the “smart” vents was for the spring and summer seasons, where I end up running heat at night, and air in the day because of the extremes in outside temperature and the effects of sun heating the upstairs.
At the least I should be able to set a “minimum” setting for each vent so when the system thinks it needs to close the vent, it will only close to whatever my setting is. this allows enough airflow to avoid the jet engine taking off in the bedroom and a person could easily dial in the settings to achieve a balance.
An alternative option would be to have 2 manual settings, one triggered when the thermostat is calling for heat and the other when it is calling for cool. I think for most homes this would be ideal, since most people have found the right settings for each vent in the summer and winter to stabilize the house without constant attention.
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This vent was extremely expensive and has shockingly caused even more arguments that I was trying to solve putting it in. Yes, the open/close feature is nice, assuming you have these on every single vent in the house - it helps from a macro scale to have the air go where it is needed. From a micro scale, they are a nightmare. The vent cover allows zero way to adjust the direction the air comes out, a feature it very badly needs. The way it's built and location in the office in my house, it is freezing my wife's feet, causing her arthritis to get very agitated and painful. The old one she could at least adjust the airflow directionally. But maybe if she could open it 25-50% of the way it might keep the house room at a good temperature without freezing her feet....but it can't do that either. And as it's been made clear, the horrible noise it makes when the air is on and the vent is closed is just a non-starter.
Flair engineers - you thought about how this could be used on a whole home basis. Because of the closed vent noise (how did this get out of R&D?) you didn't QUITE hit a home run, but it's reasonable. You need to remember that people don't exist in a whole house at once - they are in rooms with vents, and vents they actually need to be able to be controlled.
I won't lie, I won't say I feel LIED to, but advertising this as a smart vent and then not even giving it some basic dumb vent features definitely means it's far less than smart, and I do feel a bit deceived. I'm also having more fights with my wife over it, and at this point I really have no choice but to disconnect it - if it's causing her pain, that's not good. I guess I'll have a bunch of worthless junk. :( -
Flair has been giving me a nice big middle finger by deleting my comments from their ads 😂 Wouldn't want a paying customer to talk to potential customers!
I think this product is fine, they just need to do a better job of honest marketing. A lot of the ads imply they can fix one hot room/one cold room. The truth is:
* You lose a lot of existing functionality just by installing them - you can't set closure angle at anything but 5% ("0%"), 50%, 100%, where fixed vents are capable of a full range and fine tuning
* You can't close vents, as others have pointed out, you can just make them closed-ish and loud
* The software gets pissy about "backpressure" if you attempt several of the exact scenarios in their ads
That last one is one of the worst things about the company and deleting comments saying so, is the worst thing about Flair. They should rethink this and fast if they don't want to find themselves on the wrong side of a false advertising claim.
As for the other problems they're not a disaster. I think the one with no real workaround is if you need to close one in a room with a guest that hates the whooshing sound. A long story about these vents isn't going to prevent them from getting a hotel.
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I am sorry to hear you are having issues with your Smart Vents.
Please write in to support@flair.co and we would be happy to help you out.
Regards,
The Flair Team.
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I agree with many of the comments on here regarding the functionality of the vents. Virtually all of these were assumptions on my part and not the fault of Flair. This does not change whether or not the product performs well enough for each customer, but it does make a difference.
I thought they had an ability to modulate the airflow, although you will find that most zone dampers do not have this ability. I am not sure why exactly, other than some more complex calculations regarding back pressure; I could actually provide these. I think that they are actually working on this now, but it is hard to be certain.
The term “smart vents’ may not be the best term or rather, it might be outdated. It is time to integrate some AI into the platform; but depending on the size of the company, that could be difficult. Also, AI platforms such as the GPT’s have lost a massive amount of capability since late 2023. Personally, that would make me wary of building an ai model at this point. With that being said, I do not build apps so for something seemingly basic, it may not make any difference whatsoever.
Although there should be more covers with directional airflow, there are ways around this. Firstly, most ducts are not installed correctly, which leads to the air coming out of the register in an unequal manner. Rotating the vent during the installation, in all four directions, helps direct the air. Using the halfway position also addresses where the air comes out. Lastly, I had the same issue with the vent freezing my daughter while she was in bed. I also had an issue in my kitchen as it does not require a four way diffuser. The solution is to buy white magnetic vent covers (sold at lowes, etc.), cut them to cover the area that you do not want the air to come out and put them on top of the grille (inside it), with the white side down. You do not notice them and it is easy to do. You can also use a ceiling mount air deflector.
The amount of air can be handled via different types of dampers, such as a radial damper or a Constant Airflow Regulator. There are other options as well.
Regarding the back pressure issues: You can simply increase the number of vents the system has overall. If you have areas that it is an issue to close multiple vents, you can add a fake thermostat, thus forming a zone. I did this for my kitchen/dining room, which has three vents and cannot handle if two vents are closed. So I added a thermostat with 3 vents in the zone. You then setup your room to be on the fake thermostat and the real thermostat. Flair also has the ability to adjust the way that the back pressure is handled. Just search for BPP algorithm, which explains the difference between the two options. I have not decided which one works better yet.
Regarding how loud they are, I have found that they are very fickle with installation. Not only is it important to try all four directions when mounting them (and test them in all three damper positions), it is also vital that the perfect tension be placed on the mounting screws. The frame flexes if you do not use the proper holes and proper tension, for each specific vent.
These are just work arounds to help people; it is not to say that the functionality is as it should be. However, every other smart vent company (outside of commercial systems and a company that has one or two vent sizes) are defunct.
I personally do not feel they need to update their advertising (other than saying you must have a flair bridge for a new system, which is entirely inaccurate). I do feel that they need to expeditiously make improvements to the design, app and backend software.
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Mike Ibach I agree with you. Obviously, there is a lot of ranting going on in this post. The nerve of some people!
All-in-all, it's not a bad system. I have had my system up and running for five days now, and after some tweaking I think I have it where I need it. I work from home, alone, and thought I could just set all rooms besides my office to "inactive" and it would only cool my office. I was wrong. The other day, my office was 5 degrees below the set point on Flair puck in my office (cold!). This is because the inactive room vents were closed, and my office continued to cool while it tried to reach the setpoint in the other rooms. That is when I discovered the "average temp" logic is used to decide when to turn on/off the AC. I disabled setting the other rooms to inactive, and just set the temp higher in the rest of the house to solve the issue. No system, tool, gadget, etc., is perfect, and sometimes you have to adapt to the idiosyncrasies to get the results you want. Unfortunately, I still have the issue with one bedroom being too hot in the summer, but I think there is an issue with the ductwork. I plan to inspect the ducks to see if there is a blockage or pinch somewhere.
One thing I would like to point out is that now that my system is up and running, I now realize the main reason for having a Flair puck -- so you can manually adjust the temp in a room. Without a puck (and have a sensor, instead), you can only set the temp in the app. I have a puck in every bedroom.
System: 10 Flair vents, 3 pucks, 1 bridge, Ecobee3 Lite thermostat all controlled by Flair
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This still seems like a pretty trivial feature add for Flair. In Manual Mode just give us a slider 0-100%. Done.
A lot of software can take years (this was posted 2 years ago...) and be so overcomplicated with AI or whatever. But it can often be simplified to the core feature first, and that's true here: Just give us a slider in Manual Mode.
I was going to build a paid app that does it, but I'm not sure people would pay for it, and I can't afford to be working for free.
It appears we're going to be selling this home, with more than $1000 worth of Flair vents in it, so I'll no longer have hardware to test on. I don't think I'll buy Flair again in the next home.
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Chris Moschini There are a lot of seemingly trivial matters that it seems Flair could resolve or simply improve.
The 0-100% slider is so simplistic that it leaves me wondering what the real reason is that they will not do it. Does it place a greater strain on the vent components (increased warranty claims), drain battery life rapidly (possibly decreasing customer satisfaction), does it infringe on Keen Homes'/Ecovent's patent (they still have one that meticulously lays out how the system functions, but I do not recall what the patent is actually for) (Keen Homes seems defunct, but was bought by an energy company called ConnectM in 2019), etc.? Maybe they simply do not think it would add any revenue whatsoever.
I would likely try all other options (constant airflow regulators, step down diffusers, retrofit register boot dampers, traditional zoning systems provided that the plenum is accessible enough, etc.) prior to purchasing flair vents for a new house. I still decided Flair was worth it for my house. I should not have replaced all my vents, but my 800sqft third floor and three other rooms greatly benefit from Flair.
I wonder if a subscription based app would be the way to go. I guess it depends if it is a separate app that adds a few features or one that fully replaces the existing app. If the latter is the case, then costs could go up as the product becomes more advanced. An automatic setting that uses the 0-100% would be revolutionary.
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