News

Managing Energy with AirSuite & Re.Flex

AirSuite is now your energy management partner. We've joined forces with Re.Flex to help keep your electricity usage under control.

Brad Christensen, AirSuite Head of Product

8th Sep 2026

This year, we’ve been building an entirely new part of the AirSuite ecosystem: Energy Management. It’s a partnership with the team at Re.Flex, supported by Waikato’s WEL Networks.

You start by installing a Re.Flex Hub at your distribution board to monitor your site’s electricity usage on each phase. If you want to, you can stop there - use the Hub to keep an eye on things, and make behavioural changes if needed to keep usage in check.

But the real power comes from attaching Re.Flex Edge controllers to your heat pumps, hot water cylinders, and other high-load electrical appliances.

When the Hub sees a phase is getting close to hitting its current limit, it will throttle the power available to each connected appliance to prevent potential outages or overage charges. And this usually happens without you even noticing - your HVAC keeps working, but at a more sustainable level.

If you’re contemplating an infrastructure upgrade, or considering installing a solar/battery system to ride through peak demand periods, Re.Flex could be a good fit - and will save you a lot of money! If you like the sound of that, check out our video, and read on below for more information.

Ngā mihi nui / kind regards,
Brad and the AirSuite team

Building Smarter Schools with AirSuite & Re.Flex

We explain in this video how Re.Flex is a natural fit for schools.

With the gradual electrification of heating and hot water systems, and as they expand with roll growth, New Zealand schools are rapidly outgrowing their electrical capacity.

Peak demand spikes, which typically occur during the coldest days of Winter, can cause outages, and schools face the prospect of major capital upgrades to increase their capacity. Those upgrades don’t happen overnight, either!

Re.Flex dynamically manages equipment to keep demand within the school’s available supply - so during those cold days, the lights stay on, and heating continues to operate at a sustainable level, without overloading the electrical system.

Some sites with very high peak usage might need to take further steps to manage load. Monitoring is step one - then, the Re.Flex team can advise on battery (BESS) and solar options, which are often more cost-effective than a network upgrade.

At rural Puketaha School near Hamilton, Re.Flex kept the school’s peak demand under 100A, avoiding a $200k upgrade, and ensuring uninterrupted operations. Read their full case study here.

And it’s not just schools - businesses of all shapes and sizes can benefit from Re.Flex too. If it sounds like you’re in this boat, don’t wait until next Winter - get in touch with our team now to discuss your site’s needs.

What loads can be controlled with Re.Flex?

Re.Flex Edge connects to the DRED interface on an HVAC unit, which is fitted on all new heat pumps sold in Australia and New Zealand. The Re.Flex team are also using it for controlling hot water cylinders, and they say it can control just about anything that has a digital control signal.

If your heat pump is more than about 10 years old, it might not come with a DRED interface. But not to worry - we have a solution for that too.

The first AirSuite sensors fitted with an IR blaster are being rolled out to a local school later this week. These sensors control the heat pump using an infrared signal, as if they were the heat pump’s own remote control. In theory, there is no heat pump we can’t control through this method!

In case you missed it…

We’ve made lots of little changes over the last year you may or may not have seen. Here are some of the key ones we wanted to highlight:

• This week, we released a slick new redesigned version of our Portal!
• Redesigned alerts, now including a chart showing the last 24 hours of data.
• New chart colour schemes for colourblind users.
• Advanced power saving settings, to adjust the reporting interval for devices with poor signal or low battery.

And there are improvements for the devices as well, though mostly under-the-hood. These include:

• Support for a handful of countries with slightly unusual cell network configurations, including the UK.
• A power-saving feature called RAI, which can improve battery life in some parts of the world by up to around 50%.
• Support for presence detection using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacon scanning.
• Motion detection through BLE-connected PIR sensors.

In most cases, we hold on to these updates and roll them out when we know they’re really worthwhile, because downloading and applying them uses battery. But if you see something you need, let us know!

If you got this far, well done - and thanks for your continued support.

Best regards,
Brad and the AirSuite team