Flair Smart Vents: flashbacks of where DZ was 23 years ago

[Vadim Tkachenko]

Hello lurkers,

An interesting bit here: https://the-gadgeteer.com/2023/08/13/flair-smart-vents-review-keeping-my-office-cool/

I never thought of this particular idea myself, completely gave up on it with discussing it in details with a Phoenix lurker back in 2007, and even paid $7.99 of my hard earned money to investigate this technological wonder: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000WADELK (turned out to be as useless as I thought).

I also gave up on paying my money on researching competition (the most tangible of which was the original Nest - yeah, it served its purpose, but I retired it pretty soon and it's just taking space on my workshop wall lest its LiPo goes flat, 'cause taking it down would have a negative salvage value), so I'm not buying this vent to see how good it is, and certainly not for this much. And certainly not with the EULA and data hygiene - see below.

However... reading the review gave me a distinct deja vu into where DZ was back in 2000, when I didn't connect it to the HVAC yet and all it had was sensors and dampers (these: https://diy-zoning.sourceforge.net/Homeowners/images/motorized_register.jpg).

The article is pretty long, detailed, and thorough, I liked it and will try to watch this author in the future (and, in fact, about to offer him to chip in here, should he be inclined and allowed by his NDAs to do so). Go ahead and read it, I bet you'll enjoy it.

A few highlights, from the article and their knowledge base:

• One thing I still didn't get; can this system control the unit or not? The fact that it wants the thermostat connection indicates so, but there was never a positive confirmation [that I recognized as such, that is]
• (my own research) Flair itself is pretty coy on that topic as well, all they say is "Alexa or Google integration", and there's one picture at https://support.flair.co/hc/en-us/articles/360045236291-How-do-Flair-devices-communicate- that has the thermostat in the picture - but it's never spelled out
• You won't be able to use this with 5Hz networks
• There is also a 915MHz signal path (hmm... in 2023 I'd rather expect them to piggyback on mesh networking instead?)
• They use their own proprietary protocols - no go for me
• "the secret sauce is our software" - these words cause me acute allergy, for obvious reasons. They purport to do exactly the same thing that this project does, only in secret
• Internet blackouts destroy the whole system - no go for me
  
• Which also brings up the question - where exactly does this software work? If it is in the cloud, it means a serious privacy concern for me - as I've shown here in the past, A LOT can be deduced about the user behavior, family status, number of people in the family, their schedules, size of their house and even the income based on just temperature readings - and this app also wants the user's exact location... Instant win for advertisers, instant loss for the user.

Final verdict: pass for me, too many red flags and nothing new offered compared to what I already have. If someone here decides to give it a run - I'd love to hear feedback, and others would benefit from it too, please share.

--vt

[Vadim Tkachenko]

Hello lurkers,

An update just came off the list:

-----------8<--------------------

I looked at those and passed for the same reasons you did.

 Instead I bought this:

https://keenhome.io/products/smart-vent

just the vent, no controller. The vent uses zigbee and I’ve integrated it with my system. In addition to on/off it offers temp, humidity and pressure sensor. They claim to have some logic built in to handle dump zones and min open zones based on pressure readouts (of course you need to replace all vents and get controller for that to work)

The downside - despite the website being up I haven’t seen any available stock, I bought mine NOS on ebay. 

-----------8<--------------------

--vt

[Ben Madison]

Seems like with the Flair vents closing in unison it would end to issues with the HVAC unless you intentionally left standard vents in place to ensure proper airflow at the HVAC. And as a DIY product that is a recipe for disaster.

Also, the Keen units look pretty decent if they can be used directly on Zigbee without any specific controller. Any more details on the setup for these vents within DZ?

[Vadim Tkachenko]

Hello Ben,

> Seems like with the Flair vents closing in unison it would end to issues with the HVAC unless you intentionally left standard vents in place to ensure proper airflow at the HVAC.

Yep, you'll end up with a slugged compressor sooner or later, not to mention the money drain. That's a pretty bad failure mode, and I would say that's a design defect. In contrast, DZ goes to extremes to have the dampers open whenever anything goes wrong.

> And as a DIY product that is a recipe for disaster.

Well... Anything DIY is, but yes, I agree.

> Also, the Keen units look pretty decent if they can be used directly on Zigbee without any specific controller. Any more details on the setup for these vents within DZ?

Just so you know, the person that wrote the message about Keen registers doesn't currently use DZ (they might chip in in a bit and tell their story), my best guess/recollection is one of his big reasons was the change of the house and the hassle of wiring the registers, while these are wireless.

In the original message I said that I gave up on the idea of having "smart vents"; let me elaborate on reasons (some of them may be applicable to products in scope, some are beyond).

• "Smart vents" with sensors on vents are dumb, they're out of question. They measure temperature at the vent which has nothing to do with *your* comfort. The only reason to have sensors at the vent is to monitor the HVAC health.
• "Smart vents" with remote sensors (which Flair seems to be, and Keen also has them, though vastly overpriced - over x2 the price of a very decent SNZB-02) are smarter, but they are still dumb without a controller. Opening and closing the vent with no regard to where other demands (in a DZ sense, "demand" is how badly a room wants to be cooled or heated) is subpar.
• Since DZ has a pretty smart zone controller *and* a damper controller, it doesn't care about how smart the vents are, all it needs for them is to execute its commands.
• The tradeoff between the $$$ for a hardware controller and DZ is very simple: dollars and limitations vs. your time and high entry threshold. Yes, I do realize how painfully difficult DZ is to configure, and if you take a look at the latest developments (here: https://github.com/home-climate-control/dz/network) you'll see that this problem is being fixed as we speak.

Back to your question; does DZ need Keen vents? No.

Will they help? They might if you manage to configure them correctly to match DZ configuration (that'll be a tough gig to pull, though - stay tuned for the war story about mating a portable AC to DZ; in progress now :D), and their sensors might be usable together with HVAC unit health monitoring DZ is in the process of getting.

Can DZ control Keen vents? I don't have them so I don't know. If I had one of them, I might be inclined to look into it and see how I can make them work, but it takes time, and that I don't have much of recently, unfortunately. Even better, you can try integrating those vents via Home Assistant. Here, quick Google search with some juicy information: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/issues-with-keen-vents/475653/4 - yes, it looks like I can control it; let me know if/when you get it, I'll whip out an MQTT adapter for it, I can write those with my eyes closed by now).

Beware, if you connect Keen to DZ it will (hopefully) lose its smarts, but I don't see that as a disadvantage - damper behavior is coordinated between multiple zones in DZ so nothing is lost and a lot is gained.

And a word of warning - so far, ALL the smart vents I saw make noises (with the only exception being a Phidget 8 based servo controller modulating damper that I made back in 2000-2002, that controller was a piece of art, it supported constant velocity and constant acceleration transitions and could make them virtually silent; "they don't make them like that anymore"). On the other hand, you get used to that sound pretty soon and your brain tunes it out completely. For me, it was a priceless debugging tool, I knew what was going on with the system and fixed a few bugs based just on that :D

--vt

> On Monday, August 14, 2023 at 11:23:35 PM UTC-5 Vadim Tkachenko wrote:
>>
>> Hello lurkers,
>>
>> An update just came off the list:
>>
>> -----------8<--------------------
>> I looked at those and passed for the same reasons you did.
>>
>>  Instead I bought this:
>>

> --
>
> ---
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "DIY Zoning & Home Climate Control Forum" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to home-climate-con...@googlegroups.com.
> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/home-climate-control/9e5bbdaf-d068-4c77-bdf8-a72a87a095c9n%40googlegroups.com.