Energy IQ Improvement - independent TRV

Ruffinsky

Hello,

A bit of context first. I moved into a new house and went all in with Tado products to make heating easier to manage this winter.

My setup is as follows:

• Ground Floor has underfloor water heating and 2 Tado wired thermostats (Kitchen and Living Room)
• Upstairs has 4 Tado TRV (Bedrooms and Bath) + 1 additional Wireless Temp Sensor
• Viessmann 100-W 32 B1KF combi boiler to power all and 1 Tado Wireless Receiver connected to it via OpenTherm.

After trying some options to control the house, I noticed something strange happening with Energy IQ and figured I write about it.

Mind that the boiler is controlled only by Tado on OpenTherm and I set up that only 1 Bedroom, Living Room and Kitchen can trigger it, the rest of the TRVs are independent. (So they receive heat only when the boiler is called by one of the 3 above).

Keeping that in mind, the Bathroom one is set to a big temperature at all times, so it almost all the time says "heating to", but it can only receive set heat when one of the 3 controllers needs it. This is by design, I find it to be the most hassle-free for me and more efficient.

And here the problem comes in. Energy IQ estimates that this consumes the most in the house (picture attached

), even though it knows for a fact, from the Wireless Receiver, the boiler is Off. I wrote to Tado support about this, but I figured maybe someone else had this problem as well.

As you can see in the picture, it is not possible for the Bathroom to consume that much, given the conditions:

1. It can only run when Main Bedroom, Living Room or Kitchen is running.
2. It's in a very small room that heats up very quickly.

I think this will improve the estimates if fixed. Let me know what you think.

luteijn

Yes, the system not masking ('AND' operation) a room's 'demand' with the actual 'firing' of the boiler to get more or less close to actual 'usage' is a common complaind.
It also seems to me that since the system doesn't know if its request to fire the boiler is actually having an effect (the boiler might have its own logic, like anti-cycling, max-return limiter, weather-compensation, or a timer overruling tado), this naïve approach can only work in very simple set-ups, where you probably could just look at the gasmeter anyway. One could put a webcam on it, if it is 'proven technology' and not equipped with new-fangled remote-readout options, and set that up to log a timestamped picture every 5 minutes.

To do this properly, tado would need to have more sensors, for example. measuring water-flow and -temperatures at strategic points. Now they're just taking a stab at it, and I wouldn't pay for it, as it's just a gimmick.