App Ideas - 'call for heat' alignment
Proposal
1) make it clear on the app which rooms are currently calling for heat (maybe add an outlined box around rooms calling for heat)
2) have a report showing when during the day the boiler was being called for heat and by what device
3) add a tile/room on the app called Boiler. When you're in that room, you can set "accept call for heat" times (like a heating schedule). This schedule defaults to "on" for 100% of the time, but if the users switches this off during certain hours then the boiler ignores calls for heat.
4) better still, have the software recognise when multiple devices will be calling for heat and then make them align when they call for heat (so the boiler isn't always on).
Issue 2
Some rooms I don't want to ever actively "call for heat" but I do want them to receive heat when the boiler is on and to shut off when it gets too hot. I could achieve this by just using a non-tado thermostatic radiator valve. But I can't do that for underfloor heating.
Proposed solution:
Allow the user the set whether the device/room has the ability to "call for heat" (default), or not.
Cheers
Comments
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Hi, I like your thinking and have up-voted. However, for Issue 2 if you set the zone controller to independent then it will not call for heat (although it will state it is calling for heat). In reality it is just accepting heat (i.e. the TRV is open, but if the boiler isn't on nothing will happen).
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I'm new to the forum, but this thread matches with similar ideas I had. I've just replaced a Nest thermostat with the Tado as I've previously added Tado TRV's and like their functionality, however I miss the simple way the Nest indicates demand by turning orange, there is no way to know if there is any demand for heat on the Tado app (call for the boiler to fire) without skipping through the individual tiles and looking at the 3 wavy lines, it would be so helpful to know what device is calling for heat and which device is the zone master. I'd like to add also that it would be helpful to know what the hysteresis is for the smart thermostat.
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100% on board with a lot of these. I was actually quite surprised Tado doesn't properly indicate when the boiler is firing, even dumb thermostats have a little flame icon. The 3 little wavy lines are fairly meaningless in a relay system so having that extra data in the history graph would be very helpful as well.
I was also surprised it didn't do any kind of smart alignment of calls for heat and you get these annoying instances where one thermostat will turn the boiler off, and then 3 minutes later a different one will turn it back on again. Which is quite inefficient and adds extra wear and tear. Makes it feel like all the devices are acting in their own little silos rather being a part of a smart, connected system and makes for a lot of illogical behaviour.
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I do have a "solution" to the challenge of aligning heat requests. It also avoids the irritation of SRTs calling for heat without actually opening the valve sufficiently to allow water to pass. It may not suit everyone, but it's working for me. The solution is to dismount the SRTs so that they can monitor temperatures and request heat for a cold room, but they never restrict the flow of water.
This may seem a bit daft, and it sort of is, but there is method to my madness. Although I have a combi gas boiler I am heating the home as though I have a heat pump, in the pursuit of low return temps and maximum boiler efficiency. To this end (following suggestions from Heat Geek) I heat the whole house in its entirety rather than micro-zoning each room individually. Thus, when any one room needs heat and the boiler fires, all rooms receive heat at the same time. This avoids having rooms lining up in sequence to make several independent requests for heat and turning the boiler on and off whilst heating only one or two rooms at a time.
Basically, once the "cold" room has received its heat, the other rooms have also been warmed at the same time, so now there is no need for any of them to make a new request for heat - not any time soon, at least. By warming all rooms at the same time they also work as a team, each helping the other to keep warm, without cold internal walls or thermal drafts.
For this to work as it does it is important that radiators are sized correctly and balanced to distribute heat evenly throughout the system. Heating my home in this way there are some rooms warmer than others, but they are the rooms I want to be warmer.
I've actually now taken this a step further. The solution above left the SRTs in place on the radiators, but sitting loosely on top of the valves. I've now gone further and moved the SRTs elsewhere within each room so that they monitor temperatures where it is more relevant to comfort needs. Effectively I have repurposed each SRT as a smart wireless temperature sensor.
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I've commented on this before and I'm also treating my home as a single zone with a 40 degree flow temp, getting it as low as possible, the heating is on longer, but lower, but the temperatures around the house are far more stable than when our so called heating engineer set it to 60 degrees. It's early days and this will be the first winter since upgrading rads in our lounge as the one installed originally was woefully undersized, all rads now appear to be balanced. I have the TRV in the lounge as the master controller and the only one linked to our Tado thermostat, so the others are only acting as recorders, but still control the flow to their respective rads, but as they are upstairs that kind of prevents the bedrooms from getting too warm (some trade off in boiler efficiency). The whole house is at the moment within 1 degree according to the TRV's and the thermostat. I may have to increase the flow temp on really cold days (manual weather compensation), but we'll have to see. There may be a mod to give a light when the system is calling for heat, but whether it's worth it, I don't know.
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Interesting that some users are finding the whole-home single-zone approach works well for them. Our home was like that for ten years.
With the smart controls since February 2022, we micro-manage each room. If we want to see if something is calling for heat, we take a peek at the lamps on the wireless controller. The boiler seems to be happy doing it's own thing with modulation when more or less heat is needed.
This chart shows annual gas consumption since 2012.
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