Develop a "basic backup schedule" mode for when Tado outage or loss of internet
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what was annoying for us was the internet outage meaning that the boiler reverted to its old state whilst we were away on holiday which was heating on demand for rads with non trvs-the result? 24/7 for ten days of the flat being 22 degrees whilst
we were away even thought it had been set to frost protection0 -
I also abandoned Hive and it’s very random operation for Tado, which overall is much better. I don’t have the Internet challenges some report here (although I have a complex network and a very sprawling house).
@MPJ and @Flow have you considered a smart plug connected to the Tado Internet bridge PSU with either a daily reboot in the small hours, or something smarter like a RasPi with an API call to operate the plug if it detects an Internet outage, once a stable Internet feed is restored ?
If you have issues with outages generally, take a look at the Mobile broadband providers (EE, 3 etc) it’s cheap enough if you have good enough coverage of 4G signal. Also, have you reviewed whether the problem is really Virgin, or simply the number of internal devices connecting via WiFi. My home network is complex because it’s really enterprise rather than home in it’s design and implementation, because I have over 200 client devices (smart stuff, TV devices, mobile phones, laptops and tablets) and a typical home broadband router cannot cope with that kind of device count (I don’t mean the overall bandwidth demands). My broadband router does one single thing, it routes. DNS, DHCP and WiFi is all handled by other devices (RasPi for DNS/DHCP, TP-Link Omada switches and access points for networking layer), in order to ensure a stable Internet connection.
XKRMonkey
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I realise this is only tangentially connected to the OPs questions but...
As a new user my set up includes having my Tado internet bridge plugged by ethernet into a TP-Link RE220 wifi extender upstairs.
So my question is...in the event of internet outage could I connect the RE220 wifi extender to a wifi hotspot on my iphone using mobile data to keep control of the Tado devices?
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@Peter_James If it is possible for your wifi extender to extend the hotspot from your iPhone, then yes, this would allow Tado to work. I'm not sure how easy/reliable that would be in practice though.
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Whilst it would not help if the router breaks or if you are away, in all other cases, there is no need for the devices themselves to have backup schedule.
All it needs is the app, when the phone is on the same network, to be able to control them directly following the schedule.
That would at least solve a large number of the issues.
That's a software solution, and should be easy to implement... If they don't it's because they don't want to, not because they can't..
I am already regretting having opted for Tado (installed yesterday) because of this..0 -
They are not going to fix this, it's been five years and counting....0
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Can someone point me to a local schedule system? People have mentioned homekit? Do I need additional hardware for that?
Side question:
The internet bridge syncs time with Tado servers. Therefore can this not be done locally via a raspberry Pi?
We make API commands to Tado but can we send the commands directly to the internet bridge?0 -
Yes, you can use Homekit or Home Assistant for local control. Never tried Homekit, but definitely works with Home Assistant - then you can do all the schedules from there.
Worked for me, but didn't resolve the other big Tado issue of TRVs losing connection with the bridge, so in the end the whole lot went on ebay.
Side questions: no & no (unless anyone else knows different?)0 -
+1 No brainer! Why not Tado?
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Original post in Feb 2019
14 pages of comments
500+ votes
Guess what.....it's not going to happen.....not now, not ever.
Tado isn't listening0 -
I’m optimistic it will in the next generation of hardware.0
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I plan to wait until the end of the 23rd century when global warming means I don’t need to heat my home any longer2
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@jcwacky
You really are an optimist......there is absolutely nothing definitely confirming that tado will actually produce a "next generation" of devices.0 -
Tado updated this article 1 week ago. Have you seen this?
https://support.tado.com/en/articles/3477781-what-happens-when-the-internet-connection-is-temporarily-lost-can-i-still-control-my-heating-or-air-conditioning-using-tado
Based on this, I'm not fussed about schedules. As long as I can set my heating without internet, I am happy.0 -
Pleased you are happy. How are you going to know to go round the house when your Internet (or the Tado servers) go down in the middle of the night? You will still wake up to a cold house. Also what if you are away from the house at the time?
Try disconnecting your router and see if their suggestions work for you.0 -
@SPT thats a carefully worded article that masks the fact Tado lacks very basic functionality. The wording omits that your heating turns dumb and is stuck either OFF (or ON) until you intervene.
My manual control is set to 1hr, so I would have to run around the house every hour.
It also does nothing to help my lack of hot water which is scheduled to get up to temp while everyone is asleep.
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@Flow: "My manual control is set to 1hr, so I would have to run around the house every hour."
Are you sure about this? I thought the timing was done by the online backend. So, if there is no internet, wouldn't any manual change stay active until the next scheduled change after the internet reconnects?
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I thought settings for manual control and things like child lock were on device.
But it may be you are right, I would need to test it again.
Thankfully prolonged outage/loss of service only occurred during summer for me in recent memory.
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Would setting the SSID on your mobile phone same as what's saved not work via hotspot?0
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What they dont really explain is you can only manually switch hot water or heating on via the extension kit only when the smart thermostat hasn't contacted the extension kit for 30 minutes. If it does connect within that 30 minute window, then the 30 minutes starts again.
I am currently being told that ALL my devices are in fallback mode because they have lost connectivity. Nothing has changed and only when it got cold the last few days has this current issue occured.
This happens every year and 9/10 on a weekend when there is no support. I am thinking their systems cannot cope with the demand of all the individual scehdules changes that may be occuring around this time period & then the subsequent processing of them all.
They may need to turn their Amazon EC2 instances up to cope !
If you leave the house and the heating is on and the system goes into fallback mode because of an issue on Tado side, you will only be aware of it when you get home and your house is red hot and you have a massive utility bill. YES MY CURRENT PREDICAMENT !
I have to live with this until I can find a decent replacement and someone to fit it. Currently thinking of two, Drayton Wiser and Honeywell EvoHome.
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Hi all, after searching for a long time I found this discussion.
Very sad to read that Tado doesn't care and does not intent to implement a basic offline schedule.
I'm now trying to get internet trough a 4G modem, but I'm trying to find out how much data Tado uses. Does anyone now? Can anyone measure? I asked Tado in the chat, but I only got *naughtyword* answers about how great tado is.
I want to buy a data sim-card, but want to know how big the data bundle needs to be per month..
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Tiny tiny amounts of data. 1gb a month would easily cover it. The main issue I had with using a 4g mobile back up system was that it would go offline quite a lot for no apparent reason, but it really depends how strong the mobile signal is where you are.0
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Thnx! stupid that info like this is nowhere to be found... Signal is ok here, just trying to get everything working with what I have at the moment :)
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I've been holding off buying Tado thermostats for my central heating for a couple of years now, waiting for the lack of automated control without internet connection to be addressed. For me, I want to know the heating is not in a fixed mode if away for the weekend or a week or two on holiday when/if the internet is unavailable (and there is power). So manual changes or switching to a mobile backup doesn't really tick all my boxes. Anyway, when we had a large storm in the UK a year ago, a lot of the mobile network lost backup power i.e. was less resilient than my home.
Because I have never bought the system, I have never investigated whether a network solution might be possible, rather than redesigning the hardware. If the current "things" communicate back to Tado systems using the internet, I wondered whether a local proxy, prioritised by DNS changes on the household router, could pretend to be the remote Tado systems when there is no internet. That would depend on how the communications are encoded or encrypted, and whether the messaging could be duplicated. But it wouldn't require new thermostats. Tado could easily produce a little box which could do this for their existing systems (because they know the URLs, messages and formats), which householders could simply plug into their network to run control locally. Or they could publish the information, so someone else could make it.
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While i understand the reasoning it does seem a little foolhardy to assume you will always have the internet available. We use a tado system for a holiday home in the Alps so the power isn't always on. That means that the system needs the internet to boot otherwise it does nothing in this case. While less of a potential problem in the summer it is a critical flaw in winter when there is the risk of freezing pipework and damage etc as a result. The problem is the two assumptions that you are making:
- the first that the internet will be restored quickly, in our case it took 2 months and because of the fact it was off for a few months the system couldn't boot and would not start
- the second is the assumption that the router will be the only access point to the internet. In our case the telco augmented our mobile data but there was no way to connect the internet gateway to our mobiles
In our case I had to bypass the tado and had next to no control.
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My 10 Tado smart TRVs were recently rendered dumb by a 10hour internet outage that coincided with freezing outside temperatures, of course. On my hot water system I have an immersion heater run by a relay controlled by a very cheap 'smart' plug and the schedules on that device, which can only be set through the app, were not affected by the outage and worked fine. Granted, temperatures need setting to their default values too, as well as the times for schedules, but this is only a few extra bits of information for each TRV. Please can we have such a feature.?
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