Flair - Climate Control

This software has a learning curve; comparing to most other smart home products, this one begs the everyday man to learn and adapt to its own ecosystem of jargon, settings and interface versus using something easier to manage for common folk. Work in progress I suppose. Geofencing has proved to be finicky at best and it seems every so often we run into the flair app not recognizing we are home and keeping us frozen in bed with no heat. This has happened at least 6 times since ownership of this product and all installed updates (6 months of ownership). We use this for 2 room mini split Carrier system. Eventually, this will probably be top tier all around but it feels like it’s a work in progress from our perspective.

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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.

I just had a 5-zone Mitsubishi mini split system for AC installed and was looking for a solution on how to connect it to my existing Nest thermostats. The setup was a bit finicky, but by the 3rd puck you get the hang of it. Now I have 3 rooms that I can control directly from battery operated wall mounted flair pucks and 2 rooms where I have hidden away the puck (and connected to wall power for the WiFi connection) but with line of sight to the AC box and in those rooms I can control the AC from my Nest thermostats (which I put in for my radiant heat system). Works great so far. Once we get to fall I have to make sure the Nest won’t send a heating call to the AC units, but I am confident that’s easy to ensure. So far so good. I don’t think there is anything in the market that works as well for Nest integration.

Since January 2018 I’ve been using Flair vents and pucks with an Ecobee 3, Ecobee remote sensors, and a Samsung mini-split. It took a little back and forth working with Flair support to get the Samsung working with the Flair puck, but now, and with the recent addition of scheduling, everything is working seamlessly. The vents are very high quality and the Flair controls (app or online) provide a huge degree of flexibility and control, coordinating the AC, Samsung, and vents (open/close) to customize heating and cooling for our needs. We’re gone a lot in the summer and I generally set the temperature fairly high while we’re gone, but want it comfortable when we return. The Ecobee was pretty good for that, but I really needed a way to remotely turn on the Samsung unit to cool the upper levels while we’re on our way home. With Flair I can now do that. I’ve been very happy with the support I’ve gotten from Flair too. They worked with me to get the Samsung set up (it was a model they hadn’t seen before, so I had to send my remote to them so their system could learn the IR commands), but that only took a week or so. They’re now working patiently with me to try to get another brand of mini-split working at our summer cabin

I was having serious problems with a hot rooms upstairs. When the upstairs was comfortable, downstairs was freezing. Lots of complaints. Didn't matter how many ecobee Sensors I installed, or fiddled with vents. The Flair vents solved it more easily than I thought. Took abou an hour to install the vents - I got 10 for downstairs. App setup could have been better, but I'm seeing they updated the setup. Flair integrated with ecobee perfectly and I was able to reuse their Sensors. I'm going to put it on a schedule over the next few days because I want to use less AC downstairs when we're sleeping and vice versa. So far we're much more comfortable. I'll keep an eye on it. Might be able to crank out more savings.