Some rooms need more airflow than others, and sometimes there is a temperature disparity between rooms and/or levels in your home. Adjusting the air flow rate in the duct can help to alleviate these issues. This can be done by adjusting what are called dampers in the system. There are basically three types of dampers - Face, Branch, and Main. No Air Coming From Vents. How to Fix No Air Coming From Vents. Easy step by step guide one how to troubleshoot and repair vent low air flow, this article pertains to most vehicles. Difficulty Scale: 3 of 10. Step 1 - Most air control vents are equipped with a flow control door that is located at the vent outlet. This door is controlled by a.
This is the Keen Home Smart Vent. This is the Keen Home Smart Vent. Nest created a whole class of copycat smart thermostats. But the vents that actually crank out all that finely tuned air still remain largely in the shadows.“Consumers really don’t think about them,” says Ryan Fant, CEO of new company. It’s easy to see why—air vents are designed to be camouflaged, by clinging discreetly to the ceiling—but that might be set to change. Keen Home’s inaugural product is the Smart Vent, which could do for individual rooms what smart thermostats do for the house.“In homes with central air and cooling there’s a vent in every room, but no one touches them,” Fant says.
Thing is, there will always be large swaths of time when you don’t need your bedroom to be as warm as, say, the kitchen. “They’re getting the same airflow, and that’s the genesis of the whole problem: air is going into rooms at the same rate, which doesn’t make any sense,” Fant says.
By closing off certain air vents, during certain hours of the day, “you can make a 3,500-square-foot home as efficient as a 2,000-square-foot home.”. Keen HomeKeen’s Smart Vents make it possible for homeowners to do this with an app, rather than a bulky stepladder.
The vents are rigged with sensors for temperature and pressure. Once installed, you tell the vent, via the app, what room it’s in (the bedroom, the home office, the den) and it goes about building a profile for that room. If the vent gets assigned to the home office, for instance, it comes pre-programmed with the knowledge that the room will be occupied from about 9 a.m. To 6 p.m., Mondays through Fridays. The Smart Vents stay open during those hours, and closed during the rest. Should the home office worker need to log a few extra hours one night, he’ll just adjust the occupancy settings manually in the Keen app.
Like other smart gadgets, Keen will also remember user habits and intelligently open and close vents accordingly. Initial studies show this cuts down the run time on air vents by an average of 22%. Fant first realized the potential for smartphone-controlled air vents while stuck sleeping underneath a blustery one in his New York City apartment. But it was a later insight—during a trip home to St.
Louis for Thanksgiving—that seems to have informed much of the UI. Because Keen’s Smart Vents will affect actual homeowners with more than a few rooms in the house, it needs to work seamlessly for a user base of parents and families that probably already have a lot of home maintenance crap to deal with. For that reason, the app users aren’t overloaded with numbers.
“The human body can’t tell a difference between half a degree, so if they want a room warmer or cooler, they’ll do it both through visual colors and through words ‘cooler’ or ‘warmer,’ ” on the app, Fant says.There’s a ton of new companies getting into connected home gadgets, but rather than compete with the Nests and Winks and Honeywells of the market, Keen is more like a new member of a relay team, carrying the baton forward. A smart thermostat can adjust the heat in a home throughout the day, and Keen’s Smart Vents will tailor that air flow on a room to room basis. That’s not lost on those companies: Lowe’s, SmartThings, and Wink have all partnered with Keen Home already.Keen Home Smart Vents will go on sale this spring, for around $80 to $90 a vent (pricing is not yet confirmed). Fant says the average home will need between four and six vents.
Tips. If parts of your home are noticeably cooler or warmer than other parts, the supply dampers for that HVAC zone may be only partly open. In that case, you may need a professional HVAC contractor to balance your system. He will use a meter to determine whether the vent in each room has adequate air flowing, and how much air the room needs for its size, among other factors. Use a brush or vacuum to clean the air ducts in each room once a week.
A home that is well-insulated will also stay cooler more easily, using less energy.