Nest boasts that it can save customers around $140 a year, but the smart thermostat doesn’t get the whole job done. If you live in a home with many rooms and only one smart device, you’ll still be delivering heat or air conditioning to rooms unnecessarily.
CES 2015 introduced us to Keen Home’s Smart Vents, which can help regulate the temperature in your home automatically. There might be a vent in your guest room that you always leave closed until your in-laws visit, but trying to monitor all the vents in your home is a lot of effort. And Keen doesn’t want you to have to think about — or replace — all of them. For a three-bedroom, two-bathroom home, it recommends four of its smart vent to help make your home more comfortable and efficient.
The vents are available for preorder now and can be purchased starting Friday, November 27, at Lowe’s and Amazon. They’ll be $80 each, and a $40 bridge is needed to control them. The Keen app for iPhone will also launch Friday, with the Android version due in December. The vents’ wireless radios support ZigBee and Thread, so they work with Nest.
Embedded with pressure and temperature sensors, the vents are supposed to do their thing automatically. However, the app lets you control vents individually or in groups. You can schedule them or set them to keep a consistent temperature in certain rooms. Keen says its vents work best in little-used rooms or spots that are typically too stifling or chilly.
Keen’s CES debut was followed by a successful appearance on the show Shark Tank, which ended with Ryan Fant and Nayeem Hussain accepting Robert Herjavec’s offer of $750,000 for 13 percent of the company. At that point, they’d already presold 35,000 units to Lowe’s. Now it remains to be seen if smart-home enthusiasts will be biting come Black Friday.
Updated 11/30/2015: Updated to reflect the price is $80.
