Blogs — Flair history

An AC Air Compressor from the 1939 New York World's Fair   Air conditioning makes modern life livable. Hospitals, data centers, businesses, and homes—it’s hard to imagine any of these without the comforts of climate control. In fact, the Energy Information Administration estimates that 48 percent of energy consumption in the United States is from climate control. But what is the history of this invention that’s so integral to modern life? For most of history, people were content to fan themselves. Anything would suffice: a hand, a leaf, or perhaps even a handheld fan, the oldest of which date to...

How do you make a smart home even smarter? Give users the power to customize. We believe that openness is an essential part of our company. We decided early on to make the Flair API open so that users could create their own programs and integrations that work with our Smart Vents and Pucks. We firmly believe that our customers should be able to customize their hardware. I sat down with Co-founder and CEO Dan Myers and Senior Vice President of Software Ed Paget to talk about the possibilities of our Open API. “An Open API means that people can tailor their...

We thought it would be interesting to do a deep dive on our supply chain and our supply chain building experience.  Many of our customers are technical and have some exposure to what a modern day supply chain looks like, but for those that don't, knowing how many steps it takes to get a smart vent into homes is pretty eye opening.    An abbreviated view of the smart vent supply chain (click to expand)     Vent Face Plates awaiting Powder Coating Metals  One of the first things that surprised us about manufacturing at scale is how each factory...

In the last blog post, we told you about building smart vents and thermostats inclusively, affordably, and interoperably. The next thing to share is where we are and how we got here. In the Beginning Flair unofficially started in the polar vortex of early 2014. Dan was living in Chicago at the time and his upstairs was hot and downstairs was cold, a pretty common problem in most multi-floor buildings. To fix this, he was adjusting vents regularly, which helped make his place more comfortable, but got rather tedious day in and day out. There was an article in one of the local...

Many of you know that Flair builds indoor air quality (IAQ) technology and Internet of Things (IoT) products, but what you don’t know is why we choose to operate in this space and our plans for improving it.  Which is why, in our first blog post, describing our DNA is the most important thing we can do.   What We Believe Within the Internet of Things, there are innumerable standards, vagaries around data ownership, closed consortiums and walled gardens. Privacy and security are too often secondary concerns.  At Flair, we aim to use open standards and ensure that you always have...