[Released – ver. 5.10] Manual Control of Home and Away mode
Comments
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Thanks, Vertigo. This is kind of what the Tado Support said to me. I think its pretty pants.
The auto assist subscription *does not* work for us as, at times, we ignore the switch to Away mode - as we may have our daughter at home (no mobile phone..) or the cleaner is there, etc. I would have though this would be a fairly straight forward piece of functionality that Tado can put into their app. :-|
Tado?
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Could it be that automatic geofencing is a paid service so it makes no sense for tado business wise to offer a free alternative? 🤔
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I can understand Tado not offering the option to allow Home / Away manual control away from the home to users who do not have Geofencing.
But for those of us who have geofencing and want to tell Tado we are home when we are not for reasons such as someone watching our children when we are not at home. This option should be available to those of us with geofencing,
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Totally agree. I have no issues to pay for this service. And yes, I would prefer for my (not smartphone enabled) mother NOT to freeze while she's spending time with her favorite grandson 😉
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I am lucky enough that I have had Tado long enough that geofencing is actually free to me (I wouldn’t personally have tado if it wasn’t), I can imagine if they ever do introduce this ability it will come at an additional cost to the user.
The only solution I have managed to come up with is a tablet that lives at home. I have installed tado and a remote desktop control (chrome remote desktop or teamview type program) I can then remote desktop into the tablet that lives at home and turn geofrencing on, this then puts tado into “home” mode I then have to remember to turn geofencing off again when not needed. It’s not a nice solution but it does work.
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Aside from all the reasons already mentioned (which should have been obvious to tado), Im also concerned about privacy. I simply do not want every member of our family reporting their exact location to tado all the time. Its none of their business. This information is sensitive and could easily be abused.
More over, this information is also available to every tado user in the house. Its not in the app, but its available through the API. I dont need the ability to real time track my kids location or vice versa. I dont need my housekeeper even theoretically being able to pinpoint our locations at any time. I certainly dont need a hacker being able to see my exact home address, figure out Im on a business trip or know my typical day schedule and have real time positional data on every house member.
If tado had any concerns at all about privacy, they would use the phone to determine our home or away status, and perhaps some abstracted distance, and send that info to our hub at home where we control our data and get to decide who, if anyone, gets to see this data. Since we dont get to run our own hub, at most send our status to tado cloud, not our exact location. It does not, the API will give you the exact GPS coordinates of every tado user all the time (distance and bearing to home).
This is not acceptable, especially not when there is no usable alternative to geolocation to toggle home/away status.
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It is really unbelievable that it is still impossible to manually control the away mode via app or API!
This is the most wanted feature by the community and it is just ignored.
What I have implemented is my personal away mode by setting the temperatur to a specific low temperature value and set it back to auto when I set my "home mode" .
I have implemented that via home assistant and node-red.
Regards
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Same here, no node-red yet:
Still, this is not an acceptable solution for most people, and it depends on an unsupported API. I worry tado will pull the plug one day to screw people like us trying to manage our own hardware in our own houses. Tado's business seems to be geared not towards selling hardware, but taking control away from me over my own boiler and thermostats, and making me beg or pay them to turn it on or off when I want it.
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Completely agree with this suggestion. It would be a trivial change to make and a huge improvement to data security and functionality.
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Why is Tado not responding to this obvious demand?3
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I am too missing this (I thought) obvious feature.
Looking forward to see it implemented.
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I would also think this would be a feature that would be appreciated by many..!1
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Yeah good idea, I find it a bit complicated to get my heating on manually.0
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I think it would be nice if everyone would take a look at the already existing improvement requests and thus avoid duplicating them over and over again.
Best,
Andrei0 -
I would like to be able to press an away/home button. My phone doesn't always recognise that I'm away so would like to be able to turn off heating1
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I just set up my system today and I'm very disappointed to immediately run into this issue. :( I knew about the subscription requirement for Auto-Assist before I bought it, but I thought I would be able to manually set when I (or someone else) is at Home manually! Big disappointment. Thinking about returning the set...
You should never take control away from the user! Sometimes I want to set the system to Home mode when I'm away but someone else is there! (Someone who doesn't have and won't have, the app.)
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Hey Tado,
You built great product with so many great features yet you failed with such a basic requirement - to manually turn on and off your product. As you can see, it has been pain point for many, please fix it ASAP.
Thanks.2 -
Another very strong urging for Tado to implement this. I have a winter holiday coming up, and would really like NOT to have to come home to a cold house for a change.
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I saw this feature on a recent Tado tv advert. The advert showed this featrure in the app???
There are many reasons why people may use this feature. Personally due to work patterns, I go to bed and wake up at different times. I would like to be able to switch all thermastats down if i go to bed early etc.
Maybe whats needed is a bedtine mode as well as an away mode.
For me wanting to easily switch to a different mode is nothing to do with location, it's more about circumstances.
I dont think this is too much to ask for considering we pay a subscription.
Come on Tado, please impliment this.2 -
Another vote. I was fully expecting a manual home/away. On the web app as well as phone app. We don't all have smartphones, and if we do, we don't all have location tracking on all the time, for all sorts of reasons. I didn't realise I would be compelled to be tracked in order to use the system fully.
Ideally, I'd like "I'm going out now" and "I'll be home at ..." buttons to switch between Home/Away.
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+1 for manually switching and overriding away modus to home modus (to allow heating for guest).
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...and another vote +1
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I just noticed a button at the top of my App screen which said switch to Away, but it gone again? I had my geo-fencing on so assuming it had something to do with this I've tested turning Gf on/off several time but the button has gone?? Strange...was so delighted for a minute...0
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I read somewhere on the forum that the button is there but appears only when you cross the geofence. I must admit I find it quite funny.0
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I just noticed a button at the top of my App screen which said switch to Away, but it gone again?
Yup its there alright. Its just hidden from you for as long as you stay within the geofence, and after activating, the "home" button is also hidden from you until you return to within the geofence. Thats tado's idea of being helpful. Or perhaps trying to force everyone in to buying their "auto assist" service, even though that does not solve the issue either.
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I like to remotely control the heating of my house, but there is no way I would share my geolocation data, just to get automation, which I really dont need.
The lack of manual home/away control on the Tado is a major flaw. If this is about the money, then just charge a bit more for the product.
Those companies that understand that IOT is all about individual freedom and privacy will prevail, those that try to insist on closed environments and one-size fits all, will die.
Anyway, as long as the manual home/away control is missing, I will actively turn my network away from Tado products, which is a shame.
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This is the biggest reason to not choose tado. A manual control button is a must, geofencing with gps is fine, but too unreliable. If you are out the whole day in the city, it has no way of knowing if you are home or going to be away for 10 hours...
Maybe it works in rural areas... definitely not working in a big city.
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To give tado some credit, I believe their algorithm seeks to model the building dynamics and has some idea of how it heats and cools taking into account weather conditions. Therefore, in theory, tado can estimate how long is needed to re-heat the home. I'm not sure how accurate this is, especially for my old (poorly insulated) home.
The degree to which it pre-heats is set on the Away tab of the smart schedule page. Options are off, eco, balance and comfort. However, as many have pointed out, tado doesn't know how quickly we'll return home; unless it's also calculating velocity from GPS.
I've tried various settings. Sometimes my home is unduly warm upon return. Sometimes its unduly cold. This could be due to many factors including the weather, how quickly I've returned, etc. Therefore, I conclude it would be good to have a manual override to trigger home/away mode. Tado could even learn from this manual intervention to improve its algorithm!
Tado, please respond to the forum questions to clarify what is/isn't done and acknowledge valid suggestions for improvements! Otherwise, you WILL lose customers. I firmly believe some transparency would be positive for your business.
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I work about 5 minutes away from home. Even if all heaters start blasting the second I leave work, my home will still be cold by the time I get there.
Being able to hit a button in the app to turn on home mode some time before I leave would be great.
My girlfriend has a different problem, her mobile-carrier has bad reception for mobile data around our home, so the geofencing only triggers when she has connection to our wifi. This is obviously way to late.
So as it stands, I have two different reasons why using geofencing is not a solution for me and will probably return my tado devices and switch to a competitor.
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I've upvoted this proposal.
I am often away for weeks at a time in other countries. In winter it takes about 1 hour per 1C to heat the house. I can let the temperature drop to say 15-16C. I arrive at the airport lets say 3hours total journey time to the house. I usually turn on the heating if I remember, if i waited till I was home, the heating would not geofence until I was close to home (and fail to raise temp) . I don't see a simple solution here other than turn on Home mode. I used this with the old app and don't want to have to do each room individually. That's stupid. Tado saves me a fortune by not heating the house when I'm away without me doing anything
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