w.Intercom = i;Create a range extender or let us use a second bridge... — tado° Community

Create a range extender or let us use a second bridge...

Having olny 1 bridge per house is a massive design flaw yet to be addressed by Tado. Unless you leave in a tiny house made of cardboard walls, the TRV wlll lose connection or burn batteries in only a matter I'd a couple of weeks.
I live in a house across 3 floors, I really struggle with the range and can't have full coverage (and yes, i tried every possible bridge position in the house...
Being able to have a second bridge or having repeaters (wired thermostat for instance) is essential...
Please please please tado... Listen to your user community...
Note': I reposted this idea as the first post from 2017 is completely ignored by Tado...
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  • Yuupie
    Yuupie
    edited March 2022

    I've had contact with the support team, changed the location of the internet bridge 4 times, support team changed the frequency 4 times. Still I'm waking up to take a shower in 14° degrees with a child of 3 years old. This happens every day for hours at the time, connection gets losts and thus no heating.

    I'm now having to buy another Internet bridge because the support team is assuming it will be better.

    I think the appropriote solution would be to allow two internet bridges so you can hand-pick which thermostat should use a particular bridge. In my case it would allow me to have 1 internet bridge for my upstairs rooms, 1 internet bridge for my downstairs room/bathroom.


    Please save me from an angry wife in the morning ..


    house layout:




  • SimonThorpe
    SimonThorpe ✭✭
    edited October 17

    Hi,

    I've been using a solution where I have two internet bridges to cover the whole house. It just needs having two email addresses and creating two separate accounts - House1 and House2 or whatever. It's a pain, because I have to juggle with two different accounts to see all the rooms. But for example, I have one that works from Firefox, and one from Chrome so that I can see both parts of the house on the screen of my computer.

    In fact, I have three different accounts, with a third one for a separate apartment that we have. Just needs three email addresses.

    It would be trivial for Tado to fix this by just allowing multiple internet bridges on the same account. But well, they apparently have other priorities.

  • Unknown
    edited October 17
    This content has been removed.
  • Totally agree with you @Happytoon and many people are still waiting for this small upgrade...

  • 100% agree. Tado have been dodging this question for years. This is a serious problem for me. And yes I have tried all the many suggestions.
  • Also agree with this. I live in an old (built in 1750) granite walled house and the radio signal is just not strong enough to cover the entire building. I bought a second bridge by mistake and decided to set this up, it works. However it does mean I have to have two Tado accounts and don’t get a single view in things like the EnergyIQ feature.
  • I was involved in the home automation industry and meshing networks and repeaters have been around for ages. I should have known better when I purchased Tado (I thought it was a meshing system) and it worked well for the first year. Now I have a wireless TRV which randomly goes offline and causes the whole system to come on when it shouldn't. This is just poor programming by Tado. Unless a repeater appears soon (Tado just have a look around it shouldn't be hard to find a plugin repeater you can adapt), I may start again and use Drayton's Wiser system which appears to use wireless meshing technology.

  • Going to have to get rid of Tado because of this. Recently when a TRV looses signal it seems to open the radiator and call for heat, but the app shows nothing. This is Buring oil and wasting my money. It's random and incredibly frustrating after nearly €1000 investing.

    I've a mix of expensive Tado "smart" TRV's and traditional TRV's.....I've 2 smart TRV's in a box I can't use!

    If tado haven't released an update to allow a 2nd bridge they can't, or won't!

    Damn shame
  • Rschot
    Rschot
    edited October 17

    Philips Hue has a similar issue, but their solution is simple: in the app, you can toggle between bridges, each having its own account. In fact, a third party app called iConnect Hue made a front-end overlay that seamlessly integrates both into one view.

    While the (meshed) Zigbee protocol of Hue is more robust than Tado's wireless protocol, at least adding a second bridge would allow you to add range and overcome the 25 heating device limit.

    Why is this so difficult, Tado?

  • bmoore117
    edited October 17

    I too have had the range problem and tried adding another bridge. It worked but was highly inelegant and I eventually abandoned it in favour of relocating the bridge to give the best coverage possible albeit not perfect and still with the occasional dropout. Positioning the bridge as high as possible in the house and pointing downwards gave the best result. A repeater would be the ideal solution.

    If you want to try the two bridge workaround you'll need to use 2 emails (or use a gmail account because that allows you to insert a decimal point into your address which will be accepted as being a different email but resolves to the same gmail account). You'll also need to use a cloning app like Parallel Space to enable running two copies of the Tado app on one device. If you can put your lesser used radiators/rooms all on the second instance then it makes management a little easier but it's still a kludge which really shouldn't be necessary.

  • This ties in with the problem of losing connection entirely, either across the home Tado network, or the internet.

    In either case, control is lost and quite possibly the heating, depending on time of disconnect. It is not practical to manually adjust each device and to remove child lock, the devices need to be removed for battery removal and reset.

    Tado, you will eventually lose many customers if you cannot offer a solution to this very fundamental problem, in fact, it's really a design flaw and I don't know how it was missed.

  • Well, I’m concerned too, nearly a year waiting for an appropriate answer from Tado° :'(
  • User22x
    User22x
    edited October 17

    You can use 2x tado bridge withouth second email address.

    Just register one bridge and on the other side of your house put in the LAN and electric second bridge, withouth any registration or adding to app.

    It worked so by me. Have two bridges on different sides of my home and if I disconnect the not-registered bridge, the valve says "offline". If I connect him, i am on the valve online again. Maybe the two bridges communicates somehow together.

  • pcone
    pcone ✭✭✭
    edited October 17

    @User22x : I'm sure many people would like to know more about using two bridges.

    Did you manually pair the value to the second bridge, or did it automatically pick the strongest signal?

    If you adjust the temperature on that one valve, can it still trigger the boiler connected via the other bridge?

  • User22x
    User22x
    edited October 17

    I paired all devices with one bridge. After installing the valve on the other side of home, it was "offline". I did not know, that two bridges are not working, so i put in the other side of home second bridge to electricity and plugged the LAN cable to switch. After doing that, the valve vas online and I can adjust the temperature with APP for all devices. So i did not paired anything, I just turned the second bridge on and plugged to same network.

  • Csabah
    Csabah
    edited October 17
    My system was the same. Felt like week signal between devices. If I moved all devices in one room all connected but moving back to other rooms, not connected ... support finally changed frequency on my system and my system is fast with only one bridge in the house... even behind my router on it's side ( not upright) so if you have connectivity issues, contact support. Change frequency. That's helped me. Now all mi devices have instant control ( 1 or 2 seconds maximum)

    I hope that helps
  • Does anyone from Tado ever read and respond to these posts? I hope prospective customers do.

    I run a B&B, 5 beds over 3 floors with lots of solid brick walls. In 2021 I installed 19 Tado wifi TRVs, wireless smart thermostat with hot water controller. I have spent over £1,000 on taco products. When it works it is great BUT when it doesn't work it is pants.

    I have contacted Tado directly but feel fobbed off.

    The internet bridge intermittently goes haywire and some or all TRVs go offline. Switching the bridge on and off doesn't always resolve this issue and it can be a struggle to get some/all of the TRVs back online. I have tried moving the bridge around the 2nd floor landing which has an open stairwell. I have wifi extenders on the 2nd and 3rd landings. Is it worth adding more wifi extenders? Or is it a problem on some German server?

    What are the alternatives to Tado?

  • JimH
    JimH ✭✭
    Come on Tado - please get this sorted - Philips have just enabled multiple Hue hubs and have fixed the same issue…..
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  • Yes this is a massive failing of the Tado system. This is a must for lots of people but Tado couldn’t care less about it. The have absolutely no interest in developing this as 95% of their customers don’t need it. But this is a massive problem for those that do. Just Google this problem and you find literally hundreds of people complaining about this issue. I’m getting rid of this worthless system and moving to Drayton Wiser
  • This is indeed a problem with which many of us Tado users who live in large and/or multi-storey houses have had to contend for a very long while. I have been a Tado user for more than a decade and it is most regrettable that Tado still hasn’t yet bothered to deal with it.

    Until recently I had been using a set of BT mesh discs for signals to reach all four corners of this house, with the LAN port of the disc placed in the centre of the house connected via a short cable to the Internet Bridge. Still there were constant problems with dropped signals to the TRVs at either end of the house, and there were similar issues with our Sonos speakers. It was only after talking to Sonos (try talking to Tado!) that they suggested we should replace our BT mesh discs with a more reliable mesh system such as the TP-Link Deco.

    Setting up the Deco as a secondary router was almost as simple as replugging the Internet Bridge into the new node in the centre of the house. Perhaps disabling the wifi in the primary router was a little more tricky. Since then there have been no more dropped connections of any kind or the constant need to replace the batteries in our TRVs.

    Especially with the advent of so many wifi devices, I would not venture to suggest that a proper reliable mesh network is the solution for every large house. But Tado have had plenty of time to wake up and resolve the connection issues with their Internet Bridge. Let us hope that they are now emerging from their slumber.

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  • Meta
    Meta
    edited September 17
    This topic has been seen multiple times for at least the last 4 years.

    Where is the range extension???
    Second bridge?
    Still nothing?
  • Unknown
    edited October 17
    This content has been removed.
  • rafm5
    rafm5 Volunteer Moderator
    edited October 17

    With the X models now on the market, I doubt very much that tado° will devote resources to improving old v3 units...

  • FFM
    FFM ✭✭
    edited October 17

    Plus, the old version worked for 99% of all people. It was clear that spending money and time on that makes no sense. But every few months people ask and are shocked Tado "still" does nothing.

  • wateroakley
    wateroakley Volunteer Moderator
    edited October 17

    Hello @FFM @rafm5 @Meta IIRC, from a previous life at a very large telecoms network provider … the underlying wireless standard for 6LowPAN used by Tado is 802.15.4. The 802.15 concept is for a low-power and low data rate standard, with a practical range of circa 10 metre. It's used by higher layers such as (amongst others) Zigbee, 6lowpan, Thread, & Matter.

    The standard can operate in 'star' or 'peer-to-peer' (mesh) mode. In practice 'mesh' takes more power and works for devices that can be 'plugged-in', such as smart lights or usb connected. I can't see how a 'repeater' or 'mesh' is going to fit with the underlying standards and battery-operated devices?

  • Saker
    Saker
    edited October 17
    Has anyone else used the second bridge solution without a second email address / account?
  • pcone
    pcone ✭✭✭
    edited October 17

    @Saker - I have a spare bridge, so will trial it on my system. I used to have connectivity issues with my old stone house, but found the perfect spot for a single bridge that seems to have fixed it. I'll try it with one at each end and report back…

  • Saker
    Saker
    edited October 17
    So I bought a second bridge and as above just plugged it in. Seems to be working and have more connectivity than before. Think will leave for a few days - see how it goes and look to buy a 3rd for the other dead spot end of my house.

    Note - all devices registered to the original bridge and no 2nd email address