Alea Labs is introducing the “smart vent 2.0”, which again raises the questions we had about Smart Vent 1.0.

Alea Labs has introduced a new “smart vent” that “manages your home’s airflow, moving air to the right rooms at the right time based on your temperature preferences, habits, and floor plan.” Basically, you pop out your dumb vents and replace them with Alea’s and in a few minutes,

Alea Labs published an article in Medium that gave eight reasons why you should invest in “Smart Vents” for your home.

They claim that their vents are smarter than the ones I wrote about earlier, and call out “myths”, such as “people shouldn’t tamper with professionally designed systems.” In fact, they note correctly many systems are designed by rule of thumb, badly installed and often in need of adjustment. As for my worries about coils freezing or furnaces cracking, they claim that their vents monitor air flow and pressure and “are programmed to open the vents if there is any indication of crossing a risk threshold.” As for Myth 6: “Supply and return ductwork systems should be balanced… This again assumes that typical HVAC systems are perfectly designed and balanced, which is often not the case, especially in existing homes." In summary, most systems are a mess and you are not going to make it any worse.

Alea Labs’ founder Hamid Farzaneh tells Fast Company:

The Alea vent also monitors humidity, air pressure and air quality, notably VOCs. It can talk to smart thermostats, and its batteries last longer because they use temperature differences for charging. There is a lot of interesting technology packed into these vents.

© Alea Labs

However, there are a couple of things that pop out at me reading all this. The first is that I am very happy to have radiators instead of all these dumb ducts in most North American houses.

But more seriously, most of the reasons that Alea uses to justify their vents assume that the heating systems most people have are poorly designed by “rule of thumb” and poorly balanced. They note that even if the system is balanced, things change through the day, one side of the house may be in sun and get hotter and need more AC or heating.

All of which implies that their systems work best on a crappy HVAC system in an under-insulated and crappy house. This is something I noted before with the Nest thermostat: they have to work the hardest in worst houses. In a well insulated, say a Passivhaus design, a smart thermostat (and probably a smart vent) would be bored stupid.

Then they ask, “Why is the majority of homeowners or office workers unhappy with their lack of comfort? Why are most rooms either too hot or too cold at different times of a day?”

Here again, it is an argument I have made before – it is because they don’t understand what comfort is. As the Health and Safety executive in the UK noted,

Physicist Allison Bailes, in his infamous article Naked people need building science, points out that temperature is not what makes us comfortable. The biggest factor is not the air temperature, but the building around you.

Engineer Robert Bean tells us that comfort is a state of mind.

This is why I worry that no matter how smart they are, a vent is not going to make you comfortable. It might adjust the temperature in the room, and it might even do it as effectively as Alea Labs says.

But in the end, a bit of smart tech won’t make a significant difference. One has to look at the entire picture, all the factors that affect comfort. I suspect that a lot of people spending money on smart vents are going to be very disappointed. A vent, no matter how smart, cannot fix a crappy HVAC system installed in a crappy house.