Range Limitation Publicity
This community shows that lots of people are having range problems in larger houses. But nowhere in the product information does it mention that all devices have to be within range of the Bridge and that thick walls will adversely affect the range. I have my Wi-Fi router at one end of the house and my boiler at the other with 5 stone walls between them. It seems that the only way I can get the system to work is to move the wireless receiver some 10 metres from the boiler and hard wire it back to the boiler. I do not consider it satisfactory that there was no warning that it is range from the Bridge and not Wi-Fi coverage that is critical to the system working.
If relocating the wireless receiver does not work, I will be returning my tado starter kit for a refund as being unsatisfactory. However, by then I will have employed a plumber and an electrician for a day and a half each.
I will not be recommending tado to others and will alert Which? Magazine to the problem
Comments
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Refer to @mperedim post https://community.tado.com/en-gb/discussion/comment/55636/#Comment_55636
It is impossible to provide such information and sometimes the only option for some is... a return ( ͡° ʖ̯ ͡°)
Like believing car manufacturers how far you can go on a tank and then stopping in the middle of nowhere due to no fuel ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
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I agree that it is not possible to give a precise figure, but there is no reason why sales brochures cannot make a statement such as maximum range of the Bridge is x metres which may be significantly reduced by walls, and cannot be extended by repeaters. Many cordless telephones on the market include such a warning.
As it happens my electrician has been able to relocate the wireless receiver but this required a 15m cable hard wired back to the boiler. The only advice given in the owner’s or professional’s guidance was to locate the receiver 30cm from the boiler
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Not sure about brochures but Tado has an FAQ question for that. From personal experiment (3-storey house, occasional drops in connectivity but nowadays not enough to be overly annoying) it's accurate enough. It also includes a "ymmv" so that they can't be accused of misleading people.
In the past they used to claim up to 100m (!!). Apparently there is still at least one translated page in their site with this claim that they have forgotten to prune. I wouldn't expect this page to live for long after this comment of mine :)
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I agree with this - it was iffy in my house, which isn't all that big, but has solid internal wall. We have the phone line coming in at a front corner and they router is there. The boiler is on the opposite side of the house towards the back. I did check and was told it would be fine. In practice it was losing connection.
I've had to lash something up to get a reliable connection between the bridge and the receiver and have the bridge hanging off the stiarcase and it looks terrible - not a good advert for Tado, I'm sure it's put lots of people off.
Tado was fitted, along with a new boiler and pressurised hot water cylinder, as part of our house refurb so if I'd realised the limitations - mainly that the Tado bridge really needs to be in the middle of the house - it would have been easy to accommodate.
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My house is a modest three bed semi. Router is in a corner at the front of the house. Kitchen valve on opposite corner of the house, but at least in the same floor, would regularly drop out.
My solution was to use a powerline adapter to add an Ethernet port into the kitchen, but with the bridge much more centrally placed within the property and high up, near the ceiling,, to help with upstairs comms and to raise the signal path above furnishings downstairs.
Of course, a really long Ethernet cable would achieve the same goal, but the powerline adapter avoided a tricky cable run and I already had it, so no extra cost.0 -
The Bridge should be PoE capable also; at least as an additional purchase option if not included in the kits.
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yeah I get that, but a PoE Bridge (and most things with an ethernet port) should be available as an extra. Though I'm not sure what the uptake would look like to make it worthwhile for tado°.
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Hi; I may be missing something but I think I have solved the Tado range problem. Perhaps this solution is obvious to you all and I just have missed it. Anyway I have struggled with range on my Tado system since the first day I bought it. I have two radiators at one end of my house that lose signal if I move the bridge near enough to get coverage to one of my radiators at the other end of the house. I have a bungalow and the bridge is in the loft to get the signal over the solid internal walls as much as possible but no matter how much I mess around with the bridge, moving by a few cm one way or another I get patchy coverage with one or other radiator and have had to completely give up on one of the two at one end of the house.
This year I decided I was going to fix this no matter how much faff so I bought a new internet bridge and installed it in one half of the house moving the other to be more central in the the other half of the house. I was planning to introduce a second zone in my house to operate it as two houses. I knew there were app limitations but I planned to have my phone do one and my iPad do the other, my wife phone would do the second and her iPad do the one my phone did but then I discovered the geofencing problems - sigh.
Any way I had my second system and for geofencing reasons I decided to move all of the radiators I could access back onto the original system leaving just one on the new account without geofencing control. Then I realised that I had moved the internet bridge but all these other radiators were still accessing fine. So I moved also the most troublesome radiator over to the old system and what do you know - its been rock steady ever since.
So how does this work. I've tried to verify this but I think several of the radiators are accessing through the internet bridge on my second account but are included in the control of the first account. This means, I think, that range can be solved just by adding bridges on new accounts and adding radiators to that account through that bridge and then adding those radiators into the active account leaving just the bridge in these new accounts.
Other than that I can only believe Tado have invented a massive improvement to their range in the last month or so.
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Sounds interesting. Mine is working OK at present, except for initial batteries going flat quickly, but I'll give this a try if I decide to fit more valves
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After a week or so of extensive testing and trials of the excellent solutions and help from @Paul and @solbadguy2010, I have the following thoughts on the range issues.
1. It’s a miss selling issue and something that Tado really need to sort out.
2. Mount the wireless receiver as near as possible to your internet bridge so at least that connection is as bomb proof as possible. I ran mine into the middle of the house through an upstairs wall. Boiler room was just too far.
3. Internet bridge works best top down and vertically( ie with the cables coming out of the top). Mounted as high up in the house/ loft as possible and facing downwards. Personally didn’t get any benefit from the the 868mhz cable tied antenna and the passive rebro trick BUT I may have been doing something wrong.
4. It’s worth flicking on the ‘activate pairing’ switch in the Internet bridge once in a while so that if it does drop it should reconnect.
Sort out internet to the bridge so that is bonb proof as well.
All TRVs seem to perform to a similar way. Testing showed that the range for all is the same. If they don’t pass the “Hi” test they are not working even if the app doesn’t put the red dot of doom by them.
If you have multiple TRVs in a room, set the temperature measurement to the one that is nearest the bridge and hence less likely to drop. That way at least one / some radiators will be managing heat.
5. If you have installed the receiver yourself make sure you check whether it is setup for s-plan, gravity fed, combi etc.
Probably more but that0 -
Hi @rbell I haven’t been on this thread for a while and didn’t see an email nudge for your question, sorry. For me this solution has been working fine until now.
I made the grave error of trying to prepare my system for winter so I updated batteries in everything and then wanted to check out control via HomeKit. I had loaded an old configuration into HomeKit so I completely removed it and then added it back in. You add the IB and it then lets you add the devices. This is where it gets really weird. When I photographed the main IB code to add it to HomeKit it offered me to add either of my two IBs - odd that it knew about both IBs. I selected one and then it loaded my 20+ other devices, some devices even that are no longer part of my home in Tado and I have taken off and boxed up because I have changed radiators and needed fewer.
Ever since the whole system’s gone bad again. I’m getting everything now. Some rooms claim to be heating and they’re not, I am again fed up with this kit that just isn’t customer ready yet. I’m also worried because this kit managed to freeze up my home last winter by failing to turn some rads on.
I think I will go for a complete uninstall and reinstall and see where that goes.
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