Launch a range extender or upgrade to mesh network
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@cskinner , it really is better to move on, return it all and look for another solution. If at any point you have it all up and running with a different brand, would you be so kind to share your experience here? I would love to know which one you settle for.4
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@cskinner
@Robbie is spot on.
There are other solutions which already have range extenders.
Let us know how you get on.1 -
There so many new standard on the market that extend the range for example https://csa-iot.org/all-solutions/matter/ and the good things some older products can be upgraded ( it's bluetooth ).
I don't understand why Tado couldn't find a solution. Having a long house stone I can't use TADO at both end of the house. If I wasn't to late I would have send all back and buy standard Zigbee thermometer
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Same problem here - terrible signal, whatever the position of the internet bridge: many tado SRTs complete out of range; a number intermittently in range; some in range. Battery life correspondingly terrible (under 4-6 months), I assume as the SRTs are desperately trying to connect to the bridge.
This is in a largish (c. 300m2), L shaped single story home - most of the internal walls being partition rather than masonry. Wifi coverage throughout.
As evidenced by this thread, this has been drawn to tado's attention since at least 2017 by multiple users, yet no signs of a fix (many ways this could be implemented, but they seem to have no will ...).
Looks like I'll have to jump ship, having invested c. £2k in the system, further ££ on heating engineers (as frustrated with it as I am!) and countless hours dealing with "support".
Assuming there isn't another solution (e.g. third party repeater - I've not turned up anything so far which is sure to work with their protocols), does anyone else offer a similar product, but with acceptable/extendable range (e.g. using mesh or repeaters)?
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In all honesty I’d wait for Thread and Matter support. Not necessarily from Tado (they have said it’s coming but not this year). It will be the industry standard.
Currently Evehome and Nest have products that will support it via a future firmware update. I’m sure all the others - Tado, Hive etc - will follow suit too.0 -
I wish I would have seen this thread earlier. I just spent a lot of money on Tado, including 14 SRTs. Of those, 4 have intermittent or no connection at all, at opposite ends of the house. The bridge is in the middle of the house. It's a shame that they haven't solved this long standing issue, because now my investment is of much lower value than anticipated. They should at least have a 'long range' version of the bridge, or multiple bridges/range extenders in one system.
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Two weeks ago I started deploying various radiator thermostats and wired smart thermostats. It has not been an easy install. Documentation is extremely limited. The aim seems to be to “keep complexity away from the user”. Ok, but then the burden is on Tado to make it work.
How do I configure a 240m2 house with 4 floor heating zones in 5 rooms and 12 radiators in 11 rooms that each need to be controlled separately over 5 floors? And how does it determine the heat demand to my heater in the basement? Is it modulating or on/off? Etc. With much digging, I have found that Tado supports opentherm, but what functions does it support?
At installation we lost half a day figuring out how to install one wired thermostat to a floor heating valve. Turned out the thermostat was defective. Right out of the gate!
i’ve been trialing them for the past 3 weeks and yesterday one TRV suddenly said the battery was depleted. After three weeks? I changed the batteries and tested the depleted ones. 1,54V remaining. Changed them back and all is ok again. What’s going on?
Today a new challenge. Suddenly 4 lost signal. What? Then I recalled I moved the bridge like 10cm. Moved it back and yes, signal is back. Really?
I love the concept, but I’m a little worried about reliability.
Tado uses the 6LoWPAN standard for connectivity. In theory this is nice, but in practice there is very limited support and real life experience. Being an open standard, how difficult can it be to design a repeater with an backhaul on a different frequency or even regular WiFi of wired LAN? Wireless RF planning is extremely difficult, but many solutions exist for many, many years. I’ve plastered my house with managed WiFi and there is nowhere where I cannot get streaming 4K Netflix. If you can’t get the power en sensitivity of the antenna’s up, you need to increase antenna density and bring down the distance between access point and client. A well known and fundamental solution in the wireless and mobile world. What’s the problem?
What is the time path for a fix for the signal range? I would like to know, before the winter sets in!
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@Rschot , quotes from Tado:
- We don’t know any timeline.
- If your home is too complex, Tado isn’t the right solution for you.
- We will not add a repeater for the current product line because we have not enough skilled staff to develop it.
If you are up for reading 14 pages of this thread, you will come to the conclusion to make use of the 30-day-refund thingy which they offer, ASAP ;)
Wishing you all a warm winter!3 -
It’s a terribly ugly hack but wrapping tin foil around the STRVs with poor connectivity like a tulip improved things significantly. Perhaps tado could recommend some kind of reflective back drop as a slightly more elegant solution to the tin foil petal effect could be nice work around?2
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Do the v1 TRVs have a different antenna to the later ones?
I ask (and have before) because I have 14 v1 TRVs in a large house with stone internal walls, and never have a connection issue.
Could the later ones be the issue?0 -
I think the v1 Tado equipment doesn’t work with HomeKit, but no idea why this would make them better at connecting.0
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I definitely would buy a range extended, or even 2. I have a multi-floor house from the 1950s, and I had to fiddle to find a location for the bridge. The location is not ideal, and I although I currently can reach all devices, it is slow and I suspect this is due to this connection quality. I am extended the heating to the last floor and this will most probably just not work like that. I will need to spend close to a thousand euros to extended the heating (TADO valves, piping, radiators...) so adding a small budget for a TADO range extended would be a no brainer. I fear that without it I will have to accept that some valves are not reachable...
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I’m sure you’re right. The devices operate within a technical standard and frequency domain which Tado do not control.0
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I have v1 radiator stats and reception is poor.
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Hi @GrayDav4276,
Thanks for making it clear. This is also what I understood from occasionally reading about the issue, every few months, and seeing no progress. I still wanted to add my vote and comment.
I have one spare valve, and one valve on a never-used radiator, so enough to test the heating extension. I guess in the worst case, I would move back the bridge to another location as a function of which valve(s) I can accept to be disconnected.
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Just received an email explaining new features released in 2022.
FEATURES ARE USELESS IF THE SYSTEM DOESN'T WORK.
Please TADO address the customer requirement.
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Tado where are you with this - its been over a YEAR since I posted (page 4) we have now have 14 pages of customer complaining about the same issue.
Are you going to pay my gas bills when the TRV stays on following loosing connection all the time????
Absolute joke - I concur, spend your time addressing fundamental issues with your hardware as opposed to updating app GUIs or launching unless crap no one wants.
LISTEN TO YOUR CUSTOMERS!!!!
ENOUGH SAID - THIS IS TOP OF LIST OF YOUR IDEAS FORUM
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@Vinney
You don't understand.
Tado are very short staffed and all their developers are currently all taken up with Project : "Pretty Graph"
It's very important!4 -
I think the issue is that the revenue model doesn’t derive just from selling kit. It’s the smart data and using that which monetises on a subscription basis which is their real upside. So of course they are devoting most manpower to the revenue multiplying aspect.0
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@Pete I wouldn't expect a graphic designer or a finance lady to build a hardware and resolve this (⌐ ͡■ ͜ʖ ͡■)
Different teams may work together, but usually they are separate and responsible for different tasks, have different SLA or targets.
tado° has however raised a further $46m from new and existing investors, so should be able to cover the gap (if it exists) and get the resource needed.
The other question is: are V3+ devices marked as 'an obsolete product'? If yes, they simply won't get further support. R&D is not cheap and if there is no return on investment all available resource will go to another project.
tado° seems to be more interested in B2B services which generate constant cash flow, without the need of building a hardware. Similar to a subscription service - you build a product once, then charge customers monthly. Less hassle, less cost etc. A win-win situation.
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Iif the hardware does not deliver for many, they will have fewer subscribing to the add on ongoing services.
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Discussing the company’s tactics isn’t really adding to the topic. As the end-user, I just want the stuff to work, and feel like a valued customer. Tado is failing in that for many years whatever their internal business-reasoning.0
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Same here. If the new generation Tado hardware isn’t backward compatible I’ll also be voting with my feet.
Feel pretty let down by Tado over their inability to deliver a solution to their range issues. Something they seem very reluctant to acknowledge let alone fix over the past 2 years.2 -
Will this work with a tado?
https://www.vesternet.com/products/aeotec-zigbee-range-extender-zi?currency=GBP&variant=40284150956147&utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=google&utm_campaign=Google%20Shopping&utm_campaign=17611366711&utm_source=x&utm_medium=cpc&utm_content=&utm_term=&ad_id=&gclid=Cj0KCQjw4omaBhDqARIsADXULuX3eEUp3tgUGpyWqM_e8AWp_OwRxsZgoZSN21OY-REr-g2U2-sAK4caAiLnEALw_wcB0 -
No third party range extender will work with Tado, which doesn’t use zigbee anyway.0
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@Ham I suspect that Tado doesn't take too much notice of the customers who complain on this forum as they see them as a very small minority of their overall customer base.
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Hi Everyone,
It has been some time since I last posted in this specific thread, I had to go back to page find to find this comment:
In 2021, following the requests from our users, our developers made changes to the Internet Bridge firmware to maximise the stability of the connection for the most amount of users.
In 2022, there have been some changes in the app, to make it more easy for our customers to identify what the root cause of a connection issue is. Before, it was quite hard to know if the Internet Bridge had lost connection, the main "Heat source controller" had lost connection or if a specific device has lost connection. Now this should be easier to understand from the app, making troubleshooting much more effective.
What our data shows, is that for the vast majority of our customers, the current radio connection is stable. However, as you can tell from this thread, not all problems for each specific home/situation have been fully solved.
What I can tell you is this: We have reached the limits of what the current hardware is capable of, meaning that further investments from our developers will yield little to no improvements. The whole firmware in all different hardware revisions is not set up with "multi-bridge" support or Mesh support in mind.
This does not leave us with many options to make further improvements to the stability of the radio connection.
Why am I writing this post? I want to create awareness of the fact that we are not deaf to the people in this thread while at the same time illustrating that further improvements will be very hard to implement on the current hardware generation.
This is also why we offer a 30 day money back guarantee on our tado.com webshop, meaning that if there are range issues, these can be detected in the first 30 days and if they can't be solved by moving/changing the orientation of the tado bridge, the products can still be returned for a full refund.
I know that many people in this thread have their tado system for more than 30 days and a return is no longer an option at this point, and for those people I would strongly suggest to keep moving/changing the orientation of the tado bridge to find the most stable connections for your specific situation.
Furthermore, I strongly suggest you at least consider (or even test) removing any "problematic" devices from being able to call for heating from your heat source controller. This will at least eliminate the risk of a heat request remaining active on the boiler because the original requesting device has lost the radio connection. You can very easily remove certain rooms from the ability to call for heat from the boiler in the settings of your tado app. https://support.tado.com/en/articles/4689126-how-does-tado-control-heating-zones-how-can-i-change-the-zone-controller-of-a-room
Lastly, if you have connection issues with a single device in an account with many tado devices, it might make sense to do a "swap test", by swapping 2 of your tado hardware devices and monitoring if the problem remains at the same physical location or moves with the single tado device you can find out if the radio issue might be caused by a hardware issue on that specific device. This is one of the normal steps in our support process and from our experience, the likelihood of a hardware issue being the cause of the radio disconnection issue is very low.
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