Ductless Mini Split remote thermostats? Flair Puck?
Hey all, been living in my “Pretty Good House” for 4 years now with a couple of ductless mini splits serving the downstairs HVAC needs. The units themselves have plenty of capacity, but my only complaint is the terrible thermostat sensors. I am constantly having to manually adjust the settings to maintain the proper temperature. I guess the temperatures sensors on the unit are not good at sensing the temperature of the larger area.
I have been trying to find some external temperature sensor that I could place across the room or in another room to get a better result. Up to this point, I have not found anything. However, today I found a company called Flair that claims to have an IR device that would be compatible. Does anyone have experience with it?
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I found the puck to be pretty unintuitive and returned it.
A Sensibo will do what you are looking for. It's an IR repeater but you can give it limits so it will raise and lower the set point as needed. "At 7F2 set to 70F, at 70F set to 72F." Not perfect but it's at least automated. It needs line of sight and USB power.
I've found a Fujitsu hardwired thermostat controller will at least get the sensing temperature in a better spot, but the coding in these things aren't that smart. Like in auto mode, it won't force high fan unless its like 6 degrees off, way too late at that point. And most are Celsius based so there is already a big swing there.
Thanks for the reply. I assumed the Flair device would autonomously give commands to the mini split to help maintain the remote's temperature setting. However, sounds like that is not the case?
ETA: Found this...would be interested to see how/if this works. https://support.flair.co/hc/en-us/articles/360016608531-What-is-Flair-Room-Sense-
I’m sure it works. I’m just saying I was less than impressed with the hardware, and the iOS app was essentially a ported website, very clunky. But that was a couple years ago.
(For the future reader) My 5 head-unit Mitsubishi heat pump came with 5 Flair pucks. I've been using them for the past 10+ months and they're alright. Here are some thoughts I shared on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/hvacadvice/comments/tojeir/comment/imsoyvz/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3.
I'm currently experiencing overheating issues (first winter with it) most likely due to an oversized unit and the resulting refrigerant bleeding over to other satisfied head units, so looking into Cielo Breeze or MHK2. My HVAC installer is pushing MHK2 but those are at least $400/unit these days (and another $300 for the WiFi module). Very expensive.