Backpressure protection seriously over-cools my room
After having observed my flair system in operation for several months now, I am convinced there is a serious flaw in how the backpressure protection feature interacts with vent prioritization.
I have 9 total vents in my home, meaning that flair will only allow 3 of them (1/3) at most to be closed at any given time. This much is clear, and understandable. I believe others on this forum have raised the issue of whether there should be some override for this ratio, but that is not my concern here. What I am concerned about is how the system decides which vents should be allowed to be closed, and which it will keep open for backpressure protection.
Very often we have seen that an "Active" room will be kept open while "Away" rooms are allowed to close. It seems that this is the goal of the current algorithm: to prioritize airflow to active rooms over away rooms. I have to say I think this is wrong. This results in active rooms being over-cooled (or over-heated when heating).
See the example from the screenshot I have attached. Our master bedroom (where our infant son sleeps) is at 67 degrees for a target temperature of 74 (a 7 degree deviation) and yet the vent is kept open for backpressure protection, allowing cold air to pour in and cool the room even further! This is despite the fact that there are other rooms with closed vents that could profit from some extra cooling. The only reason I can think that they were not targeted is because they were marked as away.
I would much prefer that air flow to an "away" room that could use extra cooling than for an active room to be over-cooled this much. The goal of the system should be to make the active rooms as pleasant as possible (as close to their target temperatures as possible), shouldn't it?
Since there is a limited number of vents that can be closed at any point, these should be seen as a scarce resource, and so should be allocated efficiently to achieve optimal temperature for active rooms. An active room that is well past its set-point should have priority to be allocated one of these scarce vent-closures. Away rooms should have lower priority for these closures, and only be allocated when it's clear that all active rooms have an appropriate setting (open or closed).
I understand that it can sometimes make sense to close vents in away rooms to help divert air towards active ones, but this should take lower precedence than active rooms that are over-cooled (or over heated when heating).
I look forward to some fix for this issue in a future update.
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Some additional context here: I have 7 flair vents (out of 9 total vents in the house - so 2 non-smart vents that are permanently open). I have an Ecobee thermostat with Flair acting as the set-point controller. Every room has an Ecobee sensor and 4 rooms also have a flair puck. We don't require much heating (we live in Southern California), so our system is set to cool only.
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We actually have two different back pressure algorithms - one that uses inactive rooms as dump zones and another that always sends extra air to active rooms. It sounds like you'd like the former which is not the default. I'll flag this with the team to take a look and reach out. That said, if a room is getting way over conditioned there might be something else at play so it will be good for the team to take a look through the data.
Cheers,Dan
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We created a support ticket for you and a member of our technical support team will be in touch with you shortly.
Regards,
James
Flair Technical Support
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Thank you James Clarke and Daniel Myers for your responses. The team got the alternative algorithm activated and it has made a huge improvement to our house.
It would be great if these different algorithms were described in the online documentation, and if there was a way to select which one we wanted through the app (maybe in an "advanced configuration" window?)
Thanks again, you guys are awesome!
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I'm experiencing a similar issue with heating. I set the house to 18.5C at night but leave only the master bedroom active. The main thermostat is in the living room. I wake to find the master bedroom at 27C and the living room holding steady at 18.5C. What I would have expected is for the bedroom to hold at 18.5C and the rest of the house to be cooler. One potential issue is that the smart thermostat in the living room has an occupancy sensor, so I manually set the living room to inactive. The resulting behavior is as though there is a hold on the temperature at 18.5C rather than a hold on the inactive state. I noticed that Flair never set the smart thermostat set point lower than 18.5C - is it the case that Flair will never set a thermostat lower than its own set point, even if the room the thermostat is in is inactive?
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Please provide a feature to disable this Backpressure Protection. We've been installing these throughout the house, with 10 or so installed so far, and this "feature" is freezing the kitchen for no reason.
It doesn't seem possible to end up with backpressure anyway. Flair vents when closed are extremely leaky. There are gaps around the sides of the fins, which themselves are unevenly installed, in every vent we've received. Anyone with these vents will tell you a "closed" Flair vent is a loud, somewhat-open Flair vent. Air finds its way through every vent in the house just fine regardless of how open.
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