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Home Assistant

Vertigo
Vertigo ✭✭✭
edited June 2022 in General Questions & Topics

I've started dabbling in home assistant to overcome some of the limitations tado imposes upon us, I thought some of you might be curious.

if you dont have a background in IT or some coding, or you are not willing to invest significant time in it, home assistant may not be not for you; while its amazing in its abilities, its also the least intuitive app Ive used in a decade, documentation is fragmented and youtube tutorials unavoidable. Most things are configured via YAML code, not a GUI. Everything is a struggle, although once you have the basis up and running, node-red makes scripting and automation a lot easier.

Some things I implemented so far; 3 states for the heating: auto/on, away and off. I can trigger them manually or automatically using presence detection or geolocation. Nothing more fancy yet, but the sky is the limit in what it can do. I also integrated it in HA scenes, so I can click a button to set the living room up for a movie night: adjust the lights, close the blinds, turn on tv /amp / .. and automatically turn on the heating there.

Home assistant doesnt do very much specifically for climate control, but its generic enough that i can do just about anything the tado api permits, and its charts do provide good info we all want to see I think, like charts showing set temp, actual temp and boiler status (note that I havent mounted many TRVs yet, so you get unexpected results in my screenshots, with the living room heating due to another room asking for heat).

Integrating a room temperature sensor may be doable, but tricky. Its easy enough to integrate a sensor in HA, and write some automation to adjust Tado's target temperature to offset TRV measuring error, but if the scheduling isnt handled by HA, then the system has no way to know what the actual target is or was, as tado schedule isnt exposed over the API. I suppose I could write the entire schedule in HA but I havent gone that far yet.

If tado cloud or my internet goes down, even running a local HA hub wont let me control my house, because everything goes over tado cloud. That makes responses are slow. Changing a setting can take 5 seconds or more to be acknowledged in the app. Oh the joy of remote clouds. This cloud dependency is why I dont think I will keep using tado. I simply do not want my house temperature to be dependent and controlled by a third party cloud, it makes no sense for anyone running a home automation hub. Its an unnecessary point of failure, it slows things down and a privacy nightmare. No one would accept this for water or electricity, I dont see why we should for heat.

Lastly the API is "unsupported". It works fine for now, except for the inherent slowness, but, Im making a tangible investment in time and money to get this to work, if Tado decides to pull the plug or close some API calls to prevent people like me from actually having control our property or avoid paying some subscription fee for geofencing, then its all for naught. Final reason I will keep looking for an alternative that embraces open standards like Tasmota firmware and zigbee radio links.


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Comments

  • Michael
    Michael ✭✭✭

    Hi,

    Thanks for your effort for the tado° community :)

    About the cloud: it's always possible to manually control tado° right? Like you said in another post (I think), maybe try to experiment with Apple Homekit if you want to set schedules etc. without the cloud.

    Best,

    Michael

  • Vertigo
    Vertigo ✭✭✭

    Homekit protocol may indeed be the solution to disconnect from the tado cloud.

    I have a spare bridge and TRV to experiment with so I dont get cold while testing. Adding the bridge as a homekit device in HA was trivial, but I dont see how to then link TRVs and thermostat to the bridge and have them show up in HA. Tried a few things, nothing worked.

    Someone on HA forum told me he did it the other way around, configured everything via tado app/api and then added the bridge as a homekit device to HA. Im not entirely sure that actually eliminates the API, I may try that later, but since Im unsure how to undo that, Im going to wait until my new raspberry pi is here and configured and tested as HA hub.

  • samd
    samd ✭✭✭

    Please keep us posted - interesting stuff.

  • Vertigo
    Vertigo ✭✭✭

    If you mean the homekit protocol, then the TRV showed up eventually, it just took forever, or perhaps a restart.

    I havent played much more with it though, as I decided tado isnt working for me, and Im going to try some cheap chinese zigbee TRVs, ~10 euro esp32+ DHT room sensors, and while Im at it, perhaps make my own thermostat controller: https://www.smart-thermostat.eu/

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