Background:
I have Flair vents which all talk to a flair “puck” which talks to a cloud setup and there is an HA integration to talk to the cloud to try to control the vents. It works well but is very slowly due to being cloud AND the company not being responsive to any changes in the way things work (they have no interest in going local), and they actually state “within a minute” a vent would open when you tell it to open, even if you are just using their phone app.
Regarding other manufacturers, there is Keen - supposedly they had takren over Ecovent - which is local and works with HA - ( Smart Vent – Keen Home ) but some people say they are going out of business… All the buttons on their website to buy anything are disabled, and the support link is not working… Some people have said they found some on ebay and they loved them… ugh
I found these as a start - the only thing I see as a flaw here is after a long while the 3d-printed pieces may warp due to heat - but the flair vents are rock solid heavy sheet metal, very well constructed.
I would love to hack my flair vents to make them local - they are very well built but I presume to minimize manufacturing costs everything is very tightly integrated and they would have to be pretty much fully gutted (little reusable hardware to make them local).
So, I should start a thread here where people are working on this concept as DYI… to see what other videos / instructions / ideas are available that people can share here… I would suggest a list of properties people would want:
- Local control from HA
- Ability to open at least three positions - 0%, 50% and 100%
- Battery controlled (C or D batteries) with a jack for a power supply
- Made of metal
- Nice to have: air pressure and temperature at the vent itself
Please folks let’s add to this so something decent can be built, this is a big gap in the Home Automation space - !
Help? (Please pile on with comments - and links!)