Dampers wouldn't help the basement, or any other part of the house really as the main duct runs in a straight line the length of the house and goes directly through there. The vents in the basement are straight off of that main duct. There are a couple of spots where I suspect there are duct leaks, and one spot that I know there is a "mess" with probably a lot of leaks. Previous contractors that did the addition to the house apparently didn't want to, or couldn't find an adapter to go from 8" square vent to 8" round vent, so they attempted to make one out of 1/4" plywood. Gonna have to rip that out and do it properly for sure.
My plan is to close the basement vents when heating/cooling, and let the upstairs get close to temp, then turn off the heating/cooling and run the duct booster fan pulling that extra heat/cool up into the bedrooms. After fixing the known leaks I suspect this will work better, but at the moment it does fine with the Flair system if I do it all manually. The automation script worked as expected, but the lag times for web services was just to high.
If you have bad leaks from your ducts into your basement, I don't see how anything you do with controllable vents would help that. A duct booster downstream of the leak might make it a little less bad by slightly decreasing the pressure in the duct near the leak. Fix the leaks first. Then, see how the system performs and whether additional tuning is needed.
The vents and booster fan will help until I can get to patching the leaks.
Right now the space is occupied, so I have to coordinate with them a good time to move all of their stuff out of the area where I have to tear into the drywall.
Getting those closed up is going to be the next step.
I ended up returning all of the Flair vents and Pucks and got Keen Vents and Samsung Door Sensors (they report temperature).
The Flair system was flaky. I kept losing connection with some of the vents, even with a Gateway Puck at each end of the house, and it really started to bother me that if I lost internet then all the Flair vents would just open and stay that way, with no way to manually close any of them.
The Keen vents have been solid from day 1. They connected right up to HE and KeenectLight is working great.
Thanks for the update. I'll have to be making a decision about vents in a few months, very helpful.
Is this a router you use for your network, or ? How is it related to the Keen Vents? I thought that you said it connected up to HE - are you controlling them w/HE or w/"KeenectLight" or both?
A Hubitat App for controlling the Keen Vents using your own temperature sensors.
Plus, now that the latest HE update has Thermostat Controller it all works even better.
You would think in the middle of a shutdown during this pandemic that I'd have more time on my hands, but I've been crazy busy with getting a new HVAC system installed, new Solar panel system installed, trial and error for the last few months with Home Automation hubs, sensors, vents, switches, light bulbs, etc...
but, I'll see what I can do about that weekly report..
i have my own driver for the keen vent where i got the built presure and temp sensors working and reporting.. it is on hubitat package manager if you search
I cringe every time I read things like this, the Flair vents are really well built and had such potential, but Flair just doesn't want to open things up. I had Flair as well but the lack of control forced me to move on to the Keen Vents
If I had it to do all over again I definitely would have done more research and hopefully would have come to the realization sooner that "in the Cloud" = BAD.
I've gone so far the other way now that the only thing my Google Home is directly linked to is the Hubitat, which has local control over everything if the internet goes down. Almost everything I have in the house now is non-cloud. There are just a few devices that didn't really have an offline alternative, and they are non-critical devices.
I would consider a thermostat, to be a critical item. While the cloud based thermostats do still operate when offline, the "Smart" part of them is usually executed in the cloud. After learning everything I have in the past 2 months, it boggles my mind why a company would put the operations of a vent in the cloud. There's just no logical reason for it.
Companies want a large potential market. They ask themselves "How many people have internet access in their homes?" and "How many people have a hub like Hubitat in their homes?" Cloud devices have a much larger reachable audience. I hope the answer to the later question improves enough that more companies consider it a sufficient market. I'm glad that at least some do.
I experienced the same issues, and WAF was terrible when the thermostat would quit due to an isolation event. Changed to the CentraLite Pearl and haven't had an issue since.
My system is very complex, 17 Keen Vents, 20+ Aquara temp sensors, 5 virtual thermostats (for the major rooms) and the CentraLite Pearl. I use Keenect app and a very complex rule I wrote to control everything. Hubitat controls the Pearl. We just set the desired room temperature for the different rooms and the rule figures out the rest.
The only issue that I have had is three or four of the Keen vents have had controller card failures over the two years that I have them. It would be nice if Keen would sell just the controller card, but have refused my requests for that.
I am pretty happy so far with the performance of the vents, about the only thing I would change is not buying the Flair products, their idea of zoned control seemed out of touch. On top of that, they told me they have a local API, but they were not willing to open it up to people WTF. I have an Ecobee thermostat (cloud), but I added a current sensing switch to the blower motor so I know if it running even when the Ecobee cloud isn't working.
I was able to buy almost all of my Keen vents new from Ebay, and knock on wood they have all been problem-free. My system is a lot like @shawn.foist with 16 vents, and multiple temp sensors, and virtual thermostats. My vents are all hardwired with a small Zigbee repeater stuffed in the battery compartment.
I have a single zone furnace with a full HVAC venting in my finished basement.
I started out with the Keenect Lite app, but I wanted more control over the total amount of open vents at any given time, so I wrote my own app that maintains a set amount of open vent area to control proper blower backpressure and air delta coming out of the vents. It was a bit much to do in rule manager, plus I find the rule manager a little tedious to work in.
The one thing I don't care for is how Keen makes their vents to minimize backpressure problems by not completely sealing the air when they are fully closed. This means you can only close so many vents in the house before the system pressure builds and starts to leak out of the closed vents as well.
Not sure if you’ve tried it, but the Ecobee Suite Manager is a great compliment to both the smart vents and Ecobee. I used Keenect Lite which was a step up from the default Keen ecosystem, but ESM had more features, seems to provide more accurate temperatures, and is far less of a battery drain than other Hubitat apps for controlling the vents. If you don’t feel like using the smart vent controls under ESM, you don’t have to and can continue with your own custom scripts.
