Connectivity issues with smart radiator thermostats
I'm joining many others in my opinion that havng all radiator thermostats centered on a single Bridge is dumb and not applicable for anything but the smallest single-floor houses or appartments.
I have a modular house built with reinforced concrete and have been struggling to find a placement for the Internet Bridge that reaches every room's smart radiator thermostat. Ideally, I'd have one bridge on the ground level, and another on the upper floor. Is there really no way to program your Internet Bridge so they can act together in one setup? I'm not even talking about a mesh setup, just having an extra bridge in the same network.
Last year, I had some pretty good success (despite occasional "offline" or drops in charts, rooms were heated correctly 99% of the time) by placing the dongle in my TV stand downstairs, sideways even. This year, however, without changing anything to the setup other than replacing the batteries in devices that had low power and re-enabling scheduling for all rooms, I've had a lot more trouble.
I'm getting a lot more drops in connectivity so I've been trying to position the dongle differently. I've raised it to a higher position and set it vertically as recommended, and while this has improved overall the connectivity (devices don't show up as Offline as much, and drops in charts are more like blips than entire 10-hour spans missing), however there seem to be MORE issues with getting the schedule changes applied to the Smart Radiator Thermostats.
Here are some examples:
I went to bed last night and the bedroom was cold (around 17°C). I checked the app, and app said the main bedroom was "Set to 20°C" (although not "Heating to 20°C"), the smart radiator handle displayed 17°C with the house icon. This indicates that the smart radiator thermostat believed that 17°C was the schedule-appropriate temperature, and the app was certain that the smart radiator thermostat was following its schedule of 20°C. They both believed they were on schedule and the radiator never actually heated.
I set the radiators manually for a while. Today, the same room says "Heating to 17°C" when the room is actually at 18.6°C, it should be "Set to 17°C", without Heating (it's already above target). Graph shows the temperature is decreasing, but bands underneath are dark grey as if the radiator thermostat was fully open.
I changed my schedule for another room, and the smart radiator in that room never actually updated to it and still thinks it should be on frost protection instead of the 16°C minimum during the day, despite being active and reporting most of the time. It's currently Offline in the app's Home screen, but responding in the Settings tab.
Apart from the 3 very nearest radiator thermostat, every other one fails to respond to "Blink Display" half the time. They used to all react immediately last year. Heck, even the Smart Thermostat that's in the same room as the dongle isn't able to react and say HI!
Everything's completely out of whack.
I'm considering placing the dongle back where it was, since that actually worked better than trying to follow your recommendations. If I want to try a different placement in the house, I'll need to use Devolo adapters to get some network connectivity in odd places, which isn't ideal, adds another layer of occasional connectivity issues I'm worried about, and no guarantee the placement will be any better either. Trying to make a mental map of diagonals across floors and how many wall/ceiling segments these traverse and how much thickness and whether there are lots of armatures in the concrete or furnitures in the way is a total nightmare.
I don't understand why it all worked so well last year and I'm struggling so much now. Did firmware updates break something? Here are my current versions for all devices
Smart Radiator Thermostats: 95.1
Smart Thermostat: 97.1
Internet Bridge: 92.1
Please help
Comments
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So, I tested a new position for the Internet Bridge, which is pretty central in the house and has the best compromise for wall and ceiling traversal, and managed to get decent connectivity and better schedule change / Blink Display reaction in every room except one, which is massively puzzling...
The Internet Bridge is in a central position downstairs, and reaches out symetrically to both upper rooms identically. The radiator heads are placed pretty much in the same position along the same wall , at the same distance, with the same angle ceiling traversal for RF communications, yet one of them is perfectly fine and the other struggles. I replaced the batteries in the one that's having trouble (as they were low anyway), it immediately connected no question asked, but it's now offline for unknown reasons... Worked perfectly fine prior to moving the dongle.
There is literally nothing explaining the difference between the two except maybe the antenna orientation. I'll try sticking the dongle to the wall vertically, as it's just sitting flat on the floor right now.
Very hard to fine-tune positionning when there's absolutely no gauge on the quality of the connection to each device, and you have to deal with "works fine for a day and then suddenly doesn't" scenarios.
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For comparison's sake, here's the positionning of the Tado Internet Bridge last year and the new placement I'm trying now. The previous positioning had a lot more traversal. Black outline walls are reinforced concrete while blue walls are woodchip panels. Green lines indicate good performance, with wall/ceiling traversal in thicker lines, red lines indicate connectivity issues, with wall/ceiling traversal in thicker lines.
I really don't get why the upper left bedroom has connectivity issues now when there is less ceiling traversal now than before, and it's one of the closer ones upstairs.
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So, regarding the smart radiator thermostat in the upper left room which connected super quick after changing batteries and then proceeded to go offline an hour later stayed offline the entire day and mysteriously reconnected some time just before I got back home. I left the Internet Bridge in the same location but glued it to the divider wall with a small piece of double sided tape so that it's upright (the instructions recommend avoiding placement near a wall, but also recommend putting it upright... how you can manage one without the other is a mystery to me).
Connection to all rooms has been stable and uninterrupted so far. If it can remain this way throughout the weekend, I'll replace the current Devolo CPL adapters (which, right now is the only way I can get network to this location for the Internet Bridge) with a direct LAN cable and clean, discrete cable ducts along the plinths so it looks a little less messy. I'd like to avoid doing this until I'm certain the positioning is reliable.
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My internet bridge is cable tied to a stiff plastic rod which lifts it to just below ceiling height behind some wooden panelling in our hall. It’s the best location I’ve found and means it’s out of sight but we still get occasional drop outs of the receiver. Moving the latter would be quite involved so we live with a slightly impaired system; a tadoº repeater is urgently needed . . .0
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I'm happy to report that after a 12 day run, there have been no major disconnects. The bathroom radiator on the upper floorhas some blips out of touch every few days, but no lasting outage. It's the one that has the toughest wall/ceiling traversals. Short of dangling the dongle from the ceiling in the middle of the house, I don't think I can find a better spot, so this'll have to do.
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Hi - I have exactly the same problem - there needs to be a better solution for this. I've wasted a ton of batteries assuming that was the problem and a huge amount of time but no, the system is just very unstable I assume on anything but a small house. I've invested best part of £1,500 in equipment and it is all let down by the internet bridge. I basically have to choose which rooms are not part of the system which defeats the whole objective of what I was trying to achieve.
And ... yes I really have tried every bit of advice - even purchasing long cables and investing in powerline adapters so I really can put it anywhere. There was a short time when everything was working, but then a room would go offline - most frustratingly this happened once whilst away when everything was meant to be off and it went offline with the heating switched on - came back to a very hot house and no doubt a big gas bill.
My advice is - if your house is small it might be OK - if you have an extersion you might need to think controlling the heat there differently. (As an aside - there possibly could also be a competing wave-band issue - I have a car charger and solar hot water diverter that communicate in this way too - could that be a problem?).
Does anyone know if any other system works differently to this (maybe using the omnipresnt house wifi instead of having to universally communicate with the bridge?) - if so I think I'm ready for a eBay sale.
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My house is a very large 4 bed property and all the internal walls are of a brick construction, do I have connectively issues, nope not one.
However if you having SRV connection issues then the Wiser system might be better as if you fit their smart plugs they can act as extenders.
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This is the third thread I’ve read regarding this issue in the past 5 mins! When will TADO do something about this. This system is flawed by the poor reliability associated with the *naughtyword* bridge device! Why does it not recover from an internet outage. Why does it randomly disconnect from the network. Why does it randomly loose connection to other Tado devices and why are we limited to just one Bridge per account? It’s ridiculous that Tado do nothing about this and have done nothing about this for years. Their attitude towards their customers is shameful! Their support is shockingly bad! Are you listening Tado?0
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This is the Achilles' heel of the older tadoº system, no range extenders. I'm not sure whether the new System X includes them but the Drayton Wiser product certainly does and if I had my time again that's what I'd go for . . .
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