Hi, a lot of HVAC guys are spreading bad rumors about smart vents… I guess they feel threatened. Smart vents are appropriate though when the temp differential between rooms or floors is not greater than 10-15F, above that threshold, it may be more efficient to call an HVAC technician to balance the airflow in your home. There is few documentation about smart vents as they are quite new and most of it is published by smart vent vendors such as the following: https://medium.com/@AleaLabs/8-reasons-why-smart-vents-2-0-are-safer-to-hvac-systems-than-manually-adjustable-dumb-vents-d5543ce9477 and https://keenhome.io/blogs/community/how-hvac-zoning-works.
Now, I’ve created many specialized zoned heating/cooling smartapps to take advantage of smart vents. And, in my smartapps, the following safeguards have been implemented to avoid the problems you mentioned: 1) the smartapps can check the static pressure by using 2 readings in the same room -could be from 2 smart vents or a smart vent and a Flair puck for example 2) The smartapps also check the vent temperature to be within a safe range (4-130F), but the range can be customized according to your HVAC specs 3) The smartapps check that there is no more than 50% of the smart vents that are closed.
Apart from the Keen Home smart vents, there is also the Flair vents which have some pros/cons as indicated in the ST community forum here: [RELEASE] FLAIR DEVICES with new capabilities for building physical zones in your home and controlling your mini/window splits, portable heaters/coolers
I’ve created some DTHs for both smart vents under SmartThings. The one for the Keen Home vents is less chatty and avoid wasting batteries. I’ve had the Keen Home vents at my home since the beta more than 4 years ago and I just changed the batteries in December. The Flair vent is also going strong after 2 years.
If you have more questions about smart vents, you can contact me at services@maisonsecomatiq.com.