App Profile: Flair - Climate Control

BUGZC10

Rating: 4/5

Wife and I live in what I call a two story house. It’s a house with a furnished walkout basement or as I call it; the first floor. Anyway, the house has central air. The HVAC system is on the 1st floor and the thermostat is on the second floor. 1st floor was at times 5 degrees cooler than the second floor. I’m still dialing it in, but Since installing the Flair smart vents it’s much more comfortable. System is working great so far. We’ll have to see when winter arrives and the heater kicks on. I connected the Flair pucks via the Flair bridge to ensure stable connectivity. Most AC guys are not familiar with them and there was no Flair pro near me so I installed them myself. Easy installation if you can climb a ladder, know how to turn a screw driver and understand pairing a device…just follow the instructions. Note: I only installed the vents on the 1st floor. Have to decide if we are going add pucks and vents to second floor plus upgrade the Honeywell thermostat so it can pair with the pucks

ibderPlau

Rating: 2/5

The puck (hardware) does what it’s supposed to do, though the build quality feels cheap. It’s missing the ability to control several features of my mini/split, though some were added in the recent firmware update. While I understand the need to avoid rapid on/off cycles, they need to introduce a way that the system turns off completely when the actual temp is way above/below the set point in scheduled mode. The software is a mess. It feels like a minimally functional version of software to sell the hardware. Several of the adjustment widgets appear to be embedded in selectable text fields so that when you try to slide to adjust temperature you get a blue text selection indicator. The main “dial”-style adjuster to set temperature is oversensitive, making it near impossible to easily adjust temperature by a couple of degrees. The “hold” function (to temporarily override a scheduled temp) defaults to “permanent”, with no obvious way to change it to a shorter period when setting; and the facility that looks like it should allow you to set a duration just doesn’t work. Overall it’s a worthwhile product, if only to be able to adjust my mini split remotely. But overall the software needs major work.

mikemy

Rating: 2/5

This is a great idea. I have an east facing room that needs full air in the morning to keep cool but gets too cold in the afternoon/evening when the west side is getting full sun snd being cooled, even with multiple room sensors. This seemed to be the ideal solution to be able to better control the air flow to rooms when I need it. The software is not easy to use and there is no easy way to just set a schedule to turn the vent on and off. After digging through the help information, there were instructions to game the system temperature settings to get the vent to do what I wanted. I noticed though that integrating it with my smart thermostat, I got weird temperature holds and my schedule to cool the house for sleep based on other room sensors didn’t work, even though reading the support material, this shouldn’t happen. Eventually, I deleted everything, set up the Flair vent separately as if I had a dumb thermostat, and then followed the instructions to game the temperature settings to open/close the vent and it seems to work as I intended. A big pain to get there though. Still, great promise with this product if they can make improvements with the software.