Multi Home Management for Tado and other Smart Tech - Long post and interaction encouraged.

XKRMonkey

For those struggling with multi home (and Tado’s blunt refusal to offer any support for this), I have some updates to my original post about Smart tech in multiple homes that includes Tado. This has been a problem for more than just Tado, but most of the serious players have spent a little time looking at ways to make this work better for their customers, so I have adapted my original strategy somewhat over time. For clarity, I apply this to my main home, an overseas holiday home, a UK rental property and my parents homes. This may help others:

To deal with some of the complexities of multiple Smart apps and varied approaches to multi-home, I decided that using an older smart phone with it’s own property-centric email account would allow me to disconnect the tech at the property from my personal email account. This means that if I sell the property or it’s use changes, I can leave the tech installed as part of the sale and value of the property and simply hand over the “master” account and some passwords and a single smartphone device to the new owner. It presents one less headache at a potentially stressful and busy time, and in the case of a holiday or rental home it means that anyone who is visiting has access to all the smart controls required for the property without any complexity, simply by using the smartphone left at the property for that purpose.

There is no need to have a SIM in the smartphone, since it’s always Internet connected by WiFi at the property, and most people have older phones around from handset upgrades. For the record, I am currently using iPhone 7 or iPhone 8 handsets successfully for this right now - both still capable of running latest IOS and apps.

My basic Smart App requirement is Tado, some Amazon smart tech, Smart TV app, Smart kitchen apps, EWElink, Smart Life and Meross. I prefer to use Google Home to bring a single unified view to a smart device (it works well on both a smartphone or a tablet device) and crucially allows me to share a configured “Home” with other Google Home user accounts.

The simple trick here is to start by making a new email account for the property - for Apple devices this is simplest when linked to the device using an iCloud account, I don’t see why doing the same with Google / GoogleMail would be any different.

Next create accounts with your required Smart Apps using the new email account (for me this would be an Amazon account, Tado, EWElink, Smart Life and Meross). The additional advantage of the property-centric dedicated Amazon account means that even Alexa, Ring or other Amazon tech for the home is in it’s own account, linked to the right property for warranty, delivery and such like.

Next, I create the Google Home account and Amazon Alexa accounts, and for each I can link the Smart apps like Tado, Smart Life, EWElink and the like, so that as I add devices to any of the product vendor apps, they are visible to the link tech. If you’re using IFTTT then the same applies. The Alexa/Google Home apps only link to the devices at that one property and crucially this deals with some of the limitations that a single home Tado account (and some similar-ish Ring limitations for things like using Alexa for Ring Chime and camera interaction).

Now add your smart devices to the relevant apps, create scenes or routines within the apps as usual and the links back to Google Home and Alexa will mean that they discover your tech and present it. Spend what time you need to customise Alexa behaviours and create Google Home setups that suit you and the property.

Finally, for any individual user (including yourself) create a personal account for (in my case) Google Home and Ring, and also the EWElink, Smart Life and Meross. From the master apps for each home, share that home’s configuration with your personal account. For me, this allows me to switch between homes in my Google Home app, which includes the ability to see the Tado room temps and interact with them without needing to switch the tado App account.

For all the other more mature apps that I use, like Ring and the Meross/Smart Life/EWElink stuff, I can interact directly with systems in the individual homes from the individual shared instances at the app level, but for Tado, sadly any configuration changes does require me to log out from one home and log in to another, which is clunky but not the worst thing in the world. In fact, certain Ring changes also need you to be logged in from the master account and not a shared account view, but the core functionality for day to day use is shared properly, unlike Tado.

If you’re doing this for a home that you’re letting out, you can remove the apps for things like EWElink, Smart Life and Meross (and maybe even Alexa) and simply temporarily reinstall and log them in for maintenance purposes on the device that remains at the property, and you may prefer to create a user account for stuff like Ring and share to that user account and log the app in with that rather than leaving the master account active on the property Smartphone device. You can always log on to the app with the master account from another device to perform changes remotely if necessary.

Note that I have deliberately kept the number of Smart Apps in use low. I use the same devices in each property, because I understand the limitations and features of the apps they link to and it keeps things reasonably simple and predictable, but I cannot comment on whether other specific apps will work as well with this approach. Overall, I try to make sure that anything new is able to work with Google Home and Alexa, since they are they interfaces that I use to bring the home together.

I appreciate that this is not a perfect solution, but I hope that this helps other Smart home users. I am keen to hear how others have managed the wider multi-home Smart Tech challenges.

samd

Well I only have one property using tado and have very little need for smart apps but read your excellent post word for word and credit to you for it squire!