Flair - Climate Control 4+

Excellent except for cloud dependence

The vents, puck, and app work well. I can’t recommend this yet because there is no local control. Everything goes through Flair’s external service which, if it goes down or Flair goes out of business, will render this system useless. HomeKit integration would be a step in the right direction. Allowing home assistant users to talk locally to the puck would be the optimal solution. Worst case scenario the vents come apart easily and you could solder a microcontroller to the existing motor. Flair should really get Matter integration working if they want to be the undisputed champion of smart DIY HVAC. For now, if anyone else comes along and offers zigbee, zwave, or even a Shelly-like API attached to a motorized vent, I’ll switch to them in a heartbeat.

Good hardware, amateurish software, missing features

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.

Developer Response ,

Hi ibderPlau,

Have you tried using the RoomSense™ feature? This allows Flair to nudge the set point on your mini split as necessary to maintain the set point. It's located in Flair menu, Home Settings->IR Devices. Expand the mini split and tap the switch to enable RoomSense.

We've made improvements to our hold feature - tap the hold indicator button to select a different hold duration.

Great idea but convoluted software

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.