[Released – ver. 5.10] Manual Control of Home and Away mode

AdzLill

Sometimes if I’m travelling home, I’d like to be able to manually turn my heating back to home mode, so that my rooms heat up

At the moment I have to manually set a temperature for each room in order to warm my house, and can’t select Home mode until I’m within my home zone

jcwacky

Are you aware that one of Tado's primary features, "Preheat Before Arrival" does this for you automatically?

princp

Tado can’t know you’re coming home when you’re outside the geofence. A simple switch to tell it “I’m on my way” would enable it to ensure the heat is on (whether it pre-heats or not). It could easily estimate the journey time using my location. My home is not well enough insulated and the 5 minutes Tado gets when I cross the geofence is not sufficient to warm the house even with preheat on.

jcwacky

@princp You may wish to check your preheat settings. If you have it on “Comfort” it should make sure your home is pretty warm by the time you get home, no matter have far away you go. I've just been away for the weekend, I was 3 hours drive (180 miles) away from home and while away my Tado was automatically keeping it at my pre-set Away temp of 10ºC. We drove home today, about 2 hours before we arrived home Tado kicked in and started heating the house, so when we got in the front door, it was a nice temperature. Didn't need to manually tell Tado anything about my trip at any time.

Rbbhghs

We have a variation of this problem with nannies and baby sitters.
We don’t want to give them control of the heating but we don’t want the heating to switch off when they’re there. Being able to toggle manually to ‘home’ mode would address this.
Another approach would be to have phone clients that can only control the heating when on WiFi, not on mobile. This would ensure they only had heating control when in the house, and that their presence would be detected

AndrevdBerg

similar problems here;

I don't want to wate my phone battery by keeping gps on all day in order for geofencing/presence to work. If I'm at home my Wifi (and my Wife's) is typically on so that should be sufficient to go back to Home mode. In addition we have regular visitors (our household, caretakers for outr pets, etc) who do get our Wifi access as well, but no direct control over our Tado/heating. I have a perfect presence detection in my home but seeking for a way to control Tado Away/Home with that (Web http api JSON or using IFTTT).

jcwacky

@AndrevdBerg What phone do you have? With today's phones you don't need to be worrying about manually turning on/off GPS. The location services built into todays phones use a variety of techniques to get your location and so geofencing should only have a minor impact on battery life as it won't be using the GPS very often.

Andrew

I wish I could turn my heating off and on without having to leave the geofencing area. When I drive for hours to go on holiday or a long commute why can't I turn my heating off before I leave? Likewise when I return in winter from a day or more away I want to turn my heating on an hour before I get home, not when I arrive as my house takes a long time to warm up. 

AndrevdBerg

@jcwacky I have a Motorola X4

Steven

Battery usage by phone location services is surely negligible these days?

jplondon

I also am shocked you cannot manually switch to away mode.

We have people look after kids some days (Nanny, grandparent etc.) who don't have the app.

It seems the only option is to set up pre-defined time blocks with geofencing disabled to ensure the heat is on when one of them is at home with the kids.

But of course, if we do that, and then go away for some time with the kids, I'd have to manually change all those individual time blocks back to being geofenced so that they switch to away mode.

This seems unbelievably time consuming and burdensom when tado could just have a 'We are away' manual switch. Indeed, the app could automatically disable that too when you get home so you don't forget (or message you to ask if you are returning now, perhaps).

Am I missing anything? If not, then please come on Tado, this is a simple thing and a no brainer surely to make the app easier for those of us with kids and child-care?

TheMoleMan

its quite infuriating that you can't set home or away manually. if you have been away and its cold it can take an hour for the crappy app to decide that you are home, even if you load the app so the heating will not come on and the house is cold.

i get they want to leach money out of me for the auto features, but not having a manual override is ridiculous.

even just its summer and its too hot and i just want to set everything off... have to do that individually on each device.

for a 'smart' system, its pretty dum

jcwacky

@TheMoleMan " if you have been away and its cold it can take an hour for the crappy app to decide that you are home"

Sounds like a configuration issue somewhere, either with your phone or the app. Tado should start automatically heating before you get home. Often, when I've been away and I'm driving home, Tado will turn the heating back on, to Home mode, over an hour before I get home, so that it's nicely warmed up by the time I get there. I find this works great and is one of Tado's primary features. I agree a "Home mode overrride" would be useful, but I'd suggest working out why your "Preheat before arrival" feature isn't working first.

AlexHeylin

I agree need a manual mode. Preferably with the ability to set "off until" (such as for holiday when you know what time you'll return). Geolocation is not usable for me - primarily because a resident does not have smart phone (and can't have one).

necy_sm

I believe that being able to set Away from the system itself would be handy and it can somehow relax dependency on geofencing.

For example, I go to my neighbor, I would like to go to my smart thermostat and press something and inform all other components of the system that I am actually leaving my house. At the moment this is only possible via the app and for every room separately. This would be something similar to the global off but slightly different because the heating can go to away mode which must not be also off mode.

I go to my neighbor and my phone is in the house.

So in my opinion, there should also be another dimension of abstraction, like floor. So, I go, i just set one dedicated smart thermostat to away and every room goes to away mode.

VytisK

Geofencing usage is very limited imho - it is set to my phone’s location but ignores if someone else is still inside - i. e. I go to work and my family freezes :) Manual home/away mode please!!!

Davud

I would really appreciate a manual toggle of home/away too. The thermostat is almost pointless as I have Tado TRVs. Would be handy to tap the hw button twice then toggle the mode with capacitive buttons. Come on, let's make more of the capable devices we have. The geofence is limiting as you have to set the radius quite far to allow Tado to heat the house back up by the time you arrive home, that you waste an hour or so of heating when you leave before it turns off. Tapping the button as you walk out the door is surely preferable. It could then auto turn back on as you start travelling home as you'd want it on when you return. Best of both worlds!
Have we got a feature request list and any ability to vote up some of these ideas? I want to help make this product great.

renaud

@Davud on can vote by clinking on the button vote (it is on the left of « active ») on top of this thread. I wish this feature is available as well.

MonkeyMagic

Ditto.

I cannot believe this feature is not available. Even my old 'dumb' thermostat has a Holiday mode. For many reasons geo-fencing is not a solution to this for our house (children who should not the app and guests for example).

Tado?

swalder

I think this is a very basic and essential feature. I also was under the assumption a holiday mode was available, but this seems not to be the case.

KMMBE

Please just give us a manual switch

Philip

Agree! We need a toggle option like that.
Pretty vital if you ask me!

libove

A manual switch is required.

I have two homes, 100km apart, in different climate zones. I may spend a week or two at one, then a week or two at the other. Whichever home I'm not at, may get quite cold, especially the one in the mountains.

I need to be able to remotely tell the other home, half a day (or, in deep winter, a day and a half) ahead of time, "start warming up now", because it takes a long time for the surfaces to come up to temperature.

Geolocation is completely insufficient. It cannot know that far ahead of time that I'll be going to the other home.

Also, automation-only (geofencing-only) means that Tado°'s engineers have to foresee EVERY eventuality. Ask Airbus' engineers how well that worked for them...

MsSupertech

Couldn't agree more. Tado doesn't offer me the chance to switch back to 'Home. until I'm turning into my street and that's after I've already extended the GPS radius quite a lot. (Tado then warned me I was being wasteful...) I should also say that because I find the geofencing function lacks the 'finesse' that I had hoped for, I'm not prepared to opt to pay for auto assist at the moment.

If I use the 'pre-heat' comfort setting I then end up having to alter *all* my time blocks so that it doesn't heat too soon the rest of the time.

Like so many Tado functions, the intention is good but the addtion of a manual ON/OFF option would make life so much simpler.

rgh

Definitely needs a one button operation to turn hot water on or off, and also to put heating into frost protection mode when going on holiday

NiekB

I totally agree to this!

renaud

Hey Tado

When will you implement this feature that so many people are asking ?

Thanks

kostek

Totally agree. This feature will be strongly welcomed. Perfect example is Netatmo app where you can set Home/Away mode and also Turn off/on Frost protection globally for all valves.

I was expecting bigger involvement in the community from Tado side. No new, highly-demanded features were implemented for a long time.

mroelandts

Wow this would be an amazing and much wanted feature!

I created an account just to upvote this.

Huygens

This is not GDPR compliant, I'm going to contact my local authority. There is no reason justifiable for tado° to track my everyday move so I can set my heating system to away or not. This is ridiculous.

I've tried that feature to see how it is working. Basically it is crap, because you get a notification to switch it to away. This is not even automatic (unless you pay a ridiculous 3€/m which does not cover the saving of the feature, so that's stupid!). So while I'm cycling to driving to work, I should check if my phone gets the notification and then turn it off, well sorry Tado° but in most (if not every) countries this is illegal.

The stupid thing is I decided this morning to stop the geofencing on my phone. My wife has not done so yet, so now she is gone for the day and she accidentally turned the away mode. No one can turn it back to home mode!?! That's hilarious. So I'm home with no heating, and the only solution is that I turn back geolocation on my phone, wait for App to send where I am to Tado and then wait for the notification from the App that I'm indeed home so that I can turn on the heating! Or that I wait for the evening when she is back...

That is definitively not GDPR compliant.

I just bought last week my set. But I'm rather disappointed and I'm seriously considering sending it back.

My apologies for the angry tone, but honestly installing a smart solution and then losing control of one's heating system is not a nice experience. So I guess you will understand my direct assessment of that feature!

Best regards none-the-less,

PS: update compare to the above. I've activated the localization back on my phone. It automatically detect my presence inside our home and switch back without asking to home mode. However, I'm on iOS 13 and I stated the localisation to "Activate once". So after 5min or so, I hear the heaters thermostat motor (so changing the temperature), I'm checking my phone, Tado° App is asking me if I want to deactivate geofencing, I confirm it, and then tadaaa I'm back to AWAY mode... This is crazy! So what should I do now, Activate localisation for ever, or perhaps walking 1km away, and then back home while looking for the notification? What is this crap (again I'm sorry for the tone, but I don't find better word!). I'm a software engineer and project manager, for Space system and I have such a hard time controlling my heating system just because the App decides otherwise. Come on Tado° I know what rocket science is 😉 you can do better!

Huygens

I want to amend my previous post. I've contacted Tado°'s support and they have been very responsive and helpful. To switch back to Home mode, it is as simple (although not obvious directly) as calling my wife and asking her to also disable geofencing.

So now, we will be back to normal again.

Anyway, it would be good to have this mode accessible manually, for example before going on holidays or when returning from them.