Keen Smart Vents

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1

Looking at buying some Keen Smart Vents.

Can anyone that has them inform whether having Keen's "smart hub" is "required" to work with integrating to Hubitat.

Or Can each individual Vent be paired as a Zigbee device individually without their hub included and set individual rule machine rules based upon current temp sensors and vent opening?

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2

It is not required.

Yes

Possible, but you're better off using an app dedicated to this such as:

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3

Thanks Mike, I didn't know such app existed....

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4

Hey they're alive!
I remember a while ago there was a rumor of their demise.
And the website always said out of stock.

https://i.imgur.com/IPAc1CV.gif

5

Flair apparently is that way too......I would say both aren't fulfilling demand fast enough.

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6

do can the keen hub be connected to HE? or should I skip the Keen Hub and just use HE?

7

no...

yes...

I say yes to the latter as I've not been following their app in the past two years, when I was following users reports of the hub and it's app, it wasn't doing what it said on the tin, that may have changed, no real idea.

I can't imagine it being useful no matter it's state, to properly create a vent management app, one must have a thermostat as well as temperature sensors in each room in my opinion.

We do have a community vent management application available, you might want to have a look at it's feature set.
See post #2 above...

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8

Keen Home was purchased by Ecovent, a manufacturer of wildly costly custom Internet-controlled vent systems.

I have experienced four outages of the the Keen servers and vents this season, killing the automation of the vents each time, and each outage lasting for days. That's why I'm ditching their hub in favor of HE with Rule Machine.

Will Ecovent continue to sell and/or support the Keen vents? Who knows, but it seems to me that it's an excellent time to convert off their horrid Internet server architecture and apps to fully local control.

I've got an Ecobee too, but after their recent server outages (https://status.ecobee.com/) I'm not going to bother connecting it to Hubitat at all - not using their API is one less failure point. At least Ecobee continues to function locally without their servers.

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9

Good choice, in my opinion. I would never have purchased Keen vents if I had to use their hub.

10

I first used Smartthings to control the vents, but at that time ST was extremely flaky and unreliable, so I switched to the Keen hub.
For the first couple of years the Keen Hub was reliable for me, but their server availability has gone way downhill in the past year, so the Internet HVAC romance is over - strictly local processing for me for the future.

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11

My keen vents work great on HE.

The only issue I have is the battery reporting doesn't seem to work correctly / reliably. I mentioned this to @mike.maxwell before (as I think he still owns some of the vents too). I tried hitting Configure again after replacing batteries last time, but no change.

For instance, I have 4 vents:

  1. Hasn't reported any battery % since 12/07/2018

  2. Hasn't reported any battery % since 12/07/2018 (and I replaced batteries a few weeks ago because they went dead with no indication)

  3. Hasn't reported any battery % since 1/27/2019

  4. Hasn't reported any battery % since 12/07/2018. But then on 4/5/2019 reported 0% and then 100% right after. Nothing else since.

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12

if you have a keen hub, try pairing the vents to it to see if there is a firmware update for the vents..

13

what's your source ? thanks

14

I've never owned a keen hub, so not much I can do there. When I originally bought them I paired them with SmartThings, and now I pair them with hubitat.

15

The Keen Hub, not connected to Ethernet, seems to work fine as a Zigbee repeater.
It is discoverable in HE, and does appear to work as a repeater without a connected Keen Hub.

16

BTW, I'm now using Keenect Lite with Ecobee connection and Thermostat Scheduler. It works well.

17

Any chance we can get the Keen Vent device "obstruction" added to HSM so we can get an alert if a vent is in obstructed state?

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18

I'm going to make the plung on Keen because of the HE support (I did like the Flair, but alas...). I currently have Ecobee4 with 2 sensors. Will obviously use the KL app on HE, so...

Question: Do you need the Keen temperature sensors? One for each room? And are the vents zigbee, and/or the sensors? I read that the KL app will dynamically close the vents as the room temp approaches the target temp -- is the KL reading the Keen sensor reading, or the vent temp sensor?

Thanks.

19

no, you likely have motion sensors in each room already, use the readings from those.

yes

I don't know, never tried using them, no idea what protocol they use.

This sensor isn't enabled in the HE driver as it's rubbish, you can't get a room temperature reading from a sensor that's sitting in the middle of an HVAC air stream...

21

KL does not use the temp sensor in the vent, it uses whatever temp sensor you specify for the vent. When I had ST the only thing I used the in vent sensor for was to tell me when my heat/ac didn’t work, other than that, that sensor is useless.