adding a zone controller
I'm very confused about what is and isn't possible. Help please!
I have a big house with 15+ tado smart valves. Extension kit, smart wired thermostat, internet bridge and an extra wireless thermostat.
Only 10 of the valves are directly controllable, some are connected as one area (so eg "heating" is 3 valves in the hall and passageway, "sitting room" is two valves).
I still don't have enough control, at least 2 valves (on the second floor mostly) don't have a zone controller and rely on other valves calling for heat for them to heat the rooms they're in.
Tado support seems to imply there's nothing I can do. However, why can't I buy another zone controller (wired extension kit or perhaps wired thermostat?) and tell the system I have 2 zones even tho there's not another actual real zone. I assume I'd just wire the extra controller in parallel with the existing one so when either of them calls for heat they turn on the boiler and then the correct radiator would heat.
Is that correct? Or is there a cheaper, simpler way?
Thanks
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I think you’re getting physical heating zones controlled by zone controllers confused with Tado’s zones (which it calls rooms). There are only so many devices you can add with Tado and it sounds like you’ve reached your limit. You can add more devices by amalgamating some of your rooms on the app but then you’d have even less control.
I would look at alternative systems or weather compensation.0 -
That's the problem. 25 devices, 10 rooms.
But there seems to be the possibility of using a smart wired thermostat as a second zone controller, each zone controller controlling up to 10 rooms. So if I buy a smart wired thermostat and set it up as a zone controller for the second floor, won't that do the business?
I'm aware of the long discussions on the 10-room limit. Tado don't seem to be doing anything, although they've apparently promised to address this.
I was hoping a bit of lateral thinking would fix it for me....
No intention of ditching tado, having invested so much.
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As far as I know the 10 room limit is a hard limit. You can’t wire a second device to the same boiler anyway because it would conflict with the first one.
The only way around this I can see would be to buy a second system and run it in parallel, but even then this would require physical zone valves or a second boiler, plus the two systems wouldn’t talk to each other.
This might all become academic when the next generation of Tado hardware comes out, but who knows.0 -
@revdickvenn Tado have previously stated on this forum that you can have 10 rooms per zone controller, so in theory you can have more than 10 rooms calling for heat if two zone controllers are used. Have not tried it myself.
For this to work you'll need to be using relay control and not digital bus. You can connect the thermostat outputs in parallel to the single switched live input on the boiler - it's how multi zone systems work anyway. Note that you cannot use another extension kit or wireless receiver; it's limited to one per account.
I'm not convinced you will gain anything from having 15 rooms able to call for heat. The TRVs do not synchronise their call for heat requests, so you will potentially have 15 TRVs making random requests. The end result is that the boiler is constantly running. With a large house you probably have a big boiler. Do you know what the minimum output is? For larger boilers it's usually around 7KW. I doubt any of your radiators have an output greater than 2KW. Running a boiler with a load smaller than it is designed for is not efficient. Rather than micro-zoning your system you might benefit from grouping radiators/rooms together to ensure the load matches the boiler output.
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thanks GrilledCheese2. I thought that was probably the only solution. Not sure I buy your argument about micro-zoning in my situation - I use the second floor semi-regularly but don't want to heat all the rooms there to the same level by grouping. Anyway, isn't that what the tado system is all about - saving energy by granular control of rooms?
I will probably try a wired smart thermostat, wire it parallel to the other existing one, set it as a zone controller and see what happens.
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Well, success!
I bought a wired smart thermostat, set it up, pretended that I was replacing a Drayton thermostat.
Although the instructions say it would be automatically assigned to be a zone controller, it wasn't and I had to recruit Tado help, who said "I have now created a second heating zone in your account."
So now I have two zone controllers, with a limit of 10 valves on each, and that works perfectly for me.
I didn't bother wiring the "wired" thermostat to anything / anywhere since I don't have an actual valve to control. It may turn out that I have to parallel it across the other wired stat (if it's only those valves in the second zone calling for heat).
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Have now wired the NO and COM connections in parallel and all is working beautifully!
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