Feature Request: Room Always Active setting – Flair

Oliver McGill

I'm using occupancy sensors to determine the active/inactive status for rooms in my combined Ecobee/Flair setup. There are "rooms" in the house that I need to always stay active for two reasons.

  1. Smaller rooms like a powder room or mudroom, which get minimal foot traffic, either never get cooled/heated due to inactivity or get excess heat/cooling dumped in them due to Back Pressure Protection (BPP) algorithms. I'd prefer they were always active so they were cooled/heated to maintain comfort, and not pushed outside comfort range due to BPP.
  2. Certain areas, like a hallway, foyer or landing can be continually heated/cooled as they are wide open spaces that a temperature reading will never accurately capture, and so would be perfect candidates for BPP dumping as the excess would simply disperse around these non enclosed parts of the house.

Comments

  1. Chrissie

    • 1 year ago
      Hi Oliver,

    Thanks for the request - just want to make sure I have the request well understood - you'd like to be able to have some rooms automatically move between active/inactive via ecobee occupancy sensor data but would like to have certain rooms constantly set to active regardless of the occupancy sensors. I suspect this can be done now but I'll ask the team and follow up. Minor note is that active and inactive are 100% correlated with open/close because of BPP.

  2. Oliver McGill

    • 1 year ago
      Correct, I'd like to be able to set specific rooms as always active, regardless of occupancy.

  3. Chrissie

    • 1 year ago
      Hi Oliver,

    Checked with the team - the system is able to do this. Active/Inactive is only controlled by occupancy sensors when rooms don't have holds and don't have schedules set. If you create schedule for instance, you can set specific times for specific rooms where they should be expressly active or inactive. That has the added advantage of letting you make them 24/7 active or inactive, or allowing you to make them active/inactive for certain times and occupancy driven at others. Hope that helps!

  4. Oliver McGill

    • 1 year ago
      While this is an interesting idea, it doesn't really work in practice with my setup, as you have to specify a set point in any schedule and I want to use my Ecobee to set min/max temperature due to increased flexibility in changing the temperature range/hysteresis between my night and day schedules.

  5. Chrissie

    • 1 year ago
      Got it. So the more specific scenario is that you'd like to be able to do this with Set Point Controller (SPC) Thermostat (in our internal language). Will ask internally.

  6. Ryan Rigdon

    • 1 year ago
      I have the same request. I'd like to be able to mark a room as always active while letting my thermostat control the set point. Thanks!