I have an HVAC system that only has a single zone for all 3 floors in my home. The thermostat is on the middle (main) level. In the winter, I can feed a significant drop in temperature as I walk up the stairs to the bedrooms (apparently hot air does not rise in my house). The basement also has a lower temperature than the main level. Ideally, I’d like to even the temperature out more. The kids bedrooms stay pretty chili when the main floor reaches ideal temperature.
I’ve been looking into “smart vents” and was wondering if anyone can give any feedback/recommendations. Do they really work? If so, do they work well enough to justify the cost, etc?
As a first step, before I decide to commit to smart vents, I ordered an Ecobee thermostat with 3 remote sensors that I can place throughout the house, which will hopefully get the bedrooms a bit warmer. My concern is that the bedrooms may get to the desired temp, but the main level will get too warm. This is why I’m considering the smart vents to work together and get an ideal temp in each room.
I’ve come across Ecovents, Keen, and Flair in my research, but don’t have experience with any of them. Does anyone recommend any specific brand over another? Would I need to replace every vent in the house with a smart vent? Do they pair nicely with the Ecobee thermostat? Do they integrate at all with HA?
Any suggestions, advice or feedback would be appreciated.
Your house likely already has dampers built into the ducts. If possible this would be the first approach I would take. Also, pay attention to the settings of the current registers. Are the supply and returns fully open in the chilly rooms? If there isn’t a return in a room and the door is closed only so much air can be pushed in.
Finally, look at the windows and insulation in the chilly rooms. The windows may not be sealing well or there may be an insulated wall or two.
Sorry, no answers to your actual question but some things I would look at before spending some big bucks on smart vents. All the ones I have seen are pricey.
@silvrr, thanks for the feedback. We do have 2 dampers in the ducts, but they really just control the right/left hand sides of the house. There seem to be no additional dampers where ducts fork from there. The vents are all open and there is only 1 large return on each level. The house is pretty poorly insulated/sealed. It’s not ancient, but it’s old enough to have lesser insulation requirements when it was built. We’ve tried adding attic insulation and blowing additional insulation into walls in many areas. Windows are pretty old and seem to be poorly sealed in some areas.
My main motivation is to try and use smart vents to offset some of these issues in a cheaper way. I figured getting smart vents at $70-$100 each would likely be MUCH less expensive than replacing all windows in the house and upgrading insulation, etc. I’m just trying to figure out if these smart vents actually work well enough to justify the cost or if they are more of a gimmick with little impact.
I was dealing with exactly the same problem - 2nd floor bedrooms were too cold while 1st floor where Thermostat is was at the set temperature. In addition, kids bedrooms were even colder due to apparently poor duct design.
The solution involved the following
Add a temperature sensor to the master bedroom and set Nest to use the master bedroom sensor at night
Smart vents on the first floor that I close (6 out of 7) at night to redirect most hot air upstairs. I went with Keen Smart Vents (can be bought at a large discount on eBay) connected to Wink Hub (they pair as generic Zigbee bulbs) and then automated via HA. Other brands didn’t seem to allow direct control via HA and I didn’t want to depend on yet another hub\app\service\etc. Also Ecovent seemed too expensive and complicated.
The above was enough to get the master bedroom to the right temperature while keeping downstairs typically 2-3 degrees lower. However, the kids bedrooms were still colder than I wanted them to be. So the final piece of the puzzle was:
Register booster fans (non-smart) in kids’ bedrooms, hooked up to smart plugs so that I can turn them on at night when HVAC system is running (I didn’t want to keep them on all the time to avoid blowing cold air out when HVAC isn’t heating). I went with AC Infinity AIRTAP T4 fans based primarily on Amazon reviews.
The net result is that now the kids bedrooms are typically within 0.5 degrees from temperature set for master bedroom and lower level is 2-3 degrees lower. Not a huge temperature difference but certainly noticeable and I wasn’t really expecting anything better than that.
Keen vents paired to Wink have been pretty reliable with a couple of caveats:
I had to create template covers in HA for the vents so that they wouldn’t show up as light bulbs and also so that I could force-refresh their state since that didn’t always work reliably without forcing a refresh from wink after a short delay - the vents would actually switch as they should but HA state wouldn’t update
Because they are added to Wink as generic Zigbee light bulbs, they don’t expose battery information so I will just have to keep monitoring the state in HA to know when to replace the batteries. Apparently there is better integration with SmartThings and other Zigbee hubs but I can’t really comment on that.
I’ve just installed 8 Flair Vents throughout my house. I had to place the Puck at the centre of the house in a non ideal location so it could control all the vents. Fortunately for me I have an Ecobee3 with plenty of remote sensors.
The results are… WOW!!! It’s like I’ve just upgraded my entire HVAC system with the latest and greatest. Every room is precision controlled and I’m noticing the heater run alot less (it’s winter where I am at the moment). The Flair system works with Google assistant which recognises each vent as its own thermostat, so it’s like having a voice thermostat control for every room that has a google home speaker. The Flair vent hardware is also top notch, mostly metal vs the keen vent.
I would not hesitate to say this is the best HVAC solution I’ve ever used. And if I ever were to get a HVAC system installed from scratch I’d put Ecobee and Flair vents at the top of the list that would include HVAC for a new home build.
Any questions let me know. As for me, would love to fully integrate Flair vents into Home Assistant.
Despite Flair Vents not yet having Home Assistant Component or Hassio, with Google assistant I can create a routine to say “set night mode” and it’ll set the temperature for all the bedrooms and close the vents in the living areas. I’m happy with that for now.
Anything new on the front of smart register integration with Home Assistant. I have a couple of EcoNet Z-Vents that I would like to bring over from HomeSeer into Home Assistant, but can’t.
Do you mean Keen are a step up from Flair or that Flair is actually better? I have some Keen but feel dubious about the company and am not convinced about Flair because I want Zigbee devices
Flair work constantly and flawelessly. The support from the company is awesome should you need to conatact them. The pods are also supposed to work with minisplits and porta-ac units sending ir signals and I have one from honeywell that it didn’t work for and they told me if they could not get a hold of the remote I could send them one and they would include support for it. Every time I’ve needed support they were prompt and helpful. I only had 1 unit get stuck 1 time but it was easy to fix. Keen were flaky at best maybe I had a bum bridge but Flair are awesome.
Hi all. Can you connect fkair directly to zigbee network ? How long does the battery’s last ?
I have central HVAC with zones control.(the button to turn zone on or off) but I’m not sure if you can connect an egg it be dedicated to turning the zone on and off. That would be the easiest solution but I do like the idea of running it in home assistant with smart vents and local sensors
Flair vents are not zigbee, it is their own protocol and fully cloud dependent.
You might want to look into esphome as it has excellent integration into home assistant and use it if so inclined to build sensor/relay combos that would act on the zone controls (the button) as it seems you already have the zoning logic and the necessary dampers to restrict airflow
doing it in HA will save lots of money from a whole new system. - I do have to still get the vents and can easily build out the zoning logic myself once these relays work. Only 3 zones (1 upstairs and 2 downstairs) so it should be pretty easy