I think my pairing issue was ST’s fault. I heard the service was struggling last night. I did notice that my Echo could not send commands to any of my ST switch and the app was slower than normal.
So. How are you all liking your vents? Have they solved your issue or mitigated it substantially? I see discussion about technical issues, but nothing about whether you think they are worth it.
Thanks for your input.
Some of my rooms used to feel too hot/cold and they are now in a more comfortable state since i installed the vents…
Overall i’m happy.My electric & gas bills are lower by 10% on average…
i need help. I have a Keen Bridge where all my vents are connected. How do i add a Smart things hub to act like a repeater as some vents are not responding due to probably distance. Any suggestions?? i need details because i can’t find anything out there.
You would need to remove the vents from Keen hub and pair them with ST and use a SmartApp to manage them
You can then pair the Keen hub with ST and it will act as a generic zigbee repeater
Alternatively if you like the keen app and its schedules, you can buy another keen hub to act as a repeater
Repeater hubs do not need to be connected on Ethernet, just power
I am seeing pressure reported to be pretty high by 3 orders of magnitude. The reported pressure is 101456.2 Pa which would be ~407 iwc. Given that vent doesn’t open up automatically when closed, I am assuming this is reporting error on the device handler? Can you confirm and fix please.
101452Pa is about 1.001atm. To calculate icw you need two pressures, on either side of the vent. Assuming typical 1atm outside of the vent, you’d have a differential of 131 Pa, equivalent to about 0.53 inch of water column. 1 icw is about 248 Pa at 60F.
Thanks. So the pressure sensor is not sensing differential, instead absolute pressure? Without differential, how the vent is making the decision to open automatically should the differential grow beyond .5 iwc?
It probably measures the outside pressure too. Or assumes it to be 1atm? I don’t have a Keen, but that’s how inH2O/icw/icg works.
Quite possible. Hopefully @NateKeenHome or someone else from Keen clarifies that. In the mean time I will compare the readings with vent open and AC not running to vent close with AC running and the difference between two. The first one should give me outside pressure. I just want to be sure that I am not slowly damaging my hvac system by building back pressure. These things are typically designed to provide 0.5 to 0.8 iwc at each vent.
I think this is what @Mike_Maxwell was having issue with, getting answers out of @NateKeenHome a while back, not sure if this was ever answered…
I would like to say that to date, the two keen vents above the other 70 smart things I installed in my home have probably provided the biggest impact noticeable to the entire family.
I’m not trying to balance temps or anything, my needs were fairly simple. My master bedroom was set up, by design, to have 1.5 times the airflow as the rest of the house. I didn’t ask for that when it was built so I suspect that might be a standard some contractors use. There are two problems with that. One, we only spend between 8 and 10 hours in the room and two, its mostly at night when its not as hot.
What I set up was a schedule to close the vents to 30% (any more than that and the back pressure/safety would open it up more) during the day for the two master vents. In the early evening, after the sun goes down, they kick open to 50% and by 11pm they are at 85%.
I, my wife and 3 kids all noticed right away the impact. The air coming out of the vents was higher pressure and cooler. My little ones started looking for blankets in the living room because they were getting cold. Even better, the master bedroom was, instead of being super cool all the time, simply comfortable but definitely not too hot.
I have no plans to get 50% vents in my house as they suggest. I just don’t have that many problem issues with temp. in my house but I think this use case is worth studying for others. Wasted air in rooms that are unoccupied to improve common living space temps.
The biggest bonus for me was increasing air flow to the farthest ducts in on my first floor from the system. There is a good 50-60 feet of duct running along a side attic that got too hot and made that part of the house awful. Not its comfortable!
The pressure function as implemented is of absolute pressure (as opposed to gauge or differential)
The Pa figure he provided is absolute pressure. But icw is (indirectly) a relative pressure, typically measured against 1atm (same as C and F are relative temperatures, while K is absolute). In the real world, however, pressure is seldomly precisely 1atm. Vent pressure in icw should be measured as a differential against the room pressure. I do not know how the device does it, it may cut corners and just assume 1atm in the room, which, at 0.5icw thresholds, is a pretty big potential error range.
I do know how the vent does it, I took one apart and looked up the sensor part number. It’s a single ported sensor whose port is on the duct side of the vent. And while it is more than accurate and sensitive for the intended purpose, being an absolute reading with nothing to provide an offset to room ambient pressure negates any effectiveness in determining excessive hvac static pressures. Had they used a dual ported (differential) sensor, or two of the single ported sensors (one room side, the other duct side), then the pressure readings would have been usefull.
I’ve been following Keen loosely since Shark Tank…here is my situation for my top floor: I have central air to cover 4 bedrooms, living room, kitchen and bathroom. I have it controlled by one Nest which I leverage Away features for when no one is home. We added our master bedroom as an extension last year and since it’s more energy efficient, new Windows, insulation, it gets rather cold at night. I think Keen might be a perfect candidate for this room. For example, I keep my thermostat at 69, and the 3 older bedrooms now are 69-70, where as my master bedroom is 66-67. The Keen calculator tells me I need 4-6 vents on the top floor, but I am not sure that’s necessary. While the bedrooms are mostly unoccupied all day, it’s when the entire house is also unoccupied as during the summer, everyone is working/camp, etc. I have 2 supply vents in my master bedroom and one return. I am using Nest Manager to average out the temperature in all of the rooms as well but of course the colder temperature in the bedroom then makes the other bedrooms too hot at times (not verified, but the math makes sense). Not sure if folks are using Keen with Nest Manager automations? Might be too complex.
What do you folks recommend?
Exactly my point 
thank you.
Check my project below. Had same situation. @keltymd was using Nest at one point, so he may be able to tell you more about how it works with Keen/Keenect. Not sure if he still does…
Thanks for sharing. A couple of notes:
My heating is via radiator, so Keen Vents would only benefit me through summer. My heating is zoned off for new master bedroom and I was able to get those rooms comfortable in the winter by using Nest Manager and averaging out my kids bedrooms 
Wow, you keep your house at 75!! That is HOT!
Your temperatures were a lot more extreme than mine. I am just wondering if I can get away with buying just 1 or 2 vents for my master bedroom. Good idea about playing with my dumb vents to test first. I will try that.
Also - Do you need to buy the smart bridge? Or can connect directly to Smartthings? I believe it’s a Wifi based, so it sounds like we need the bridge.
Since it’s sold out until the Fall, I wouldn’t be able to do anything until next summer anyway.
I was keeping it at 74 because of the little ones…But yeah, you can reverse the temperatures and you have my summer conditions. My oldest’s room would be 83 while our master would be a lot colder, maybe not 65…but close to 68