The Big Idea Archive

Marax

We have possibility to mark which wifi is in our home.
I miss similar option mark wifi which - if I am connected - marks me as AWAY.

I live in block of flats. In one flat I live and in the other one I work. So am away but for geofencing feature I look like still at home.

Brew

Hi there as we approach our first winter with our Tado system which we installed back in the spring and are very fond of I have a question. Can i set my ground floor, three zones to a specific temperature without having to go into three different zones and setting the temperature.

Examples are social occasions or perhaps when activity is all over a specific floor I want the kitchen, dining room and lounge to be a temperature until the next scheduled change.

One option would be dynamic groups - say you have all your rooms as a individual zones and being able to group these zones together and set them.

Or have a preset - zones 1,2,3 set to 19 deg until next change. Perhaps this could be from the likes of IFTTT, if we were able to set zone to 19 deg until next change, one could then stack zones under one IFTTT button.

I appreciate versions of this have already been requested.

jeanpaulh

Please fix the early start functionality for TRVs. This function is not working for more than 3 years now!

When the early start is enabled the room reaches the target temperature hours too early. Tado ignores this error since 2016 and states it has low priority. On their website they still claim this a a feature.

After complaining about this on tweakers.nl (a Dutch tech-forum) the answer was: please make a topic on our forum as we do not see any complaints there.

So please; if you experience issues with the early-start on TRVs please leave a note below as a kind reminder to Tado.

Thanks!

AndersModberg

Leif
Please check this post: https://community.tado.com/en-gb/discussion/1796/smart-ac-control-10-c-setting#latest

and consider if this matches what you are after.
Br Anders

kitus

I wonder why Tado does not append room name on the device name as a prefix. It is a real nightmare to get HomeKit you display a reasonable home setup with the device serial number only.

Oom

Should be known with them though: https://www.reddit.com/r/tado/comments/9thbl4/how_early_is_early/

Vertigo

Lets be honest, home automation is a mess right now. So many standards, from zigbee and zwave to proprietary standards to private wifi clouds.

I have only a few "smart" devices in my house; I have a wifi doorbell, some wifi bulbs to experiment with, Logitec harmony hub for my media center setup, and tado. I was looking in to expanding this with automatic shutters, motion sensors, smart lights throughout and a few other things, but making them work together is proving to be a nightmare.

And im not even setting some high bar; I want things that ought to be simple, like turning on the light and raising the temp when I enter a certain room. Turning off all lights when no one is home. Pressing a button to start a tv night, heating up the living room, dimming lights, and starting the media center. Stuff like that, which should be trivial.

But its not, because there isnt a single platform that supports my limited number of devices. I can use smartthing for most devices, but smart things doesnt work with Tado. To interface with tado and my home cinema, I can use openhab, but openhab doesnt work with some of the wifi stuff, unless I start soldering and flashing tasmota on it. I can use google home to control all most all my devices, but I cant create any scripts in google assistant to tie them together, and the interface is lousy. If I end up needing half a dozen apps on my phone, I may as well just use conventional switches.

Please tado, dont make it any worse than it is. I suspect your devices use zwave or zigbee under the hood, please document and open up the API so third parties can interface with it directly. That way more advanced users can choose what platform they want to use, third parties or even end users can provide functionality you are not offering yet. Please, focus on selling hardware, provide useful software for users who just want to use tado via your app and cloud, but dont try to protect the software part from people who want more, who want to run their own hub and dont want to be tied to someone's cloud, let alone, multiple clouds.

jeanpaulh

I'm pretty sure they are aware. But they just keep ignoring it :-)

Vertigo

Below my findings using the Tado app on android. Much of the criticism and many of the suggestions and requests can be found elsewhere on this forum, but I thought Id go through the app and list my findings.

Homescreen

- impossible to reorder tiles

It would seem rather basic we can change the order of the rooms somehow.

-adjusting temps

This interface to adjust temps is a bit clumsy. Whats wrong with + and - buttons?

- Confusing layout for temps

The home window shows measured temperatures on top and in large font. The set temperature is on the bottom (and arguably too small). There is no visual indication of the difference between them, or the trend in the difference. Is a room heating or cooling? Hard to say. When you click on a zone the order and font size reverses: set temperature now shows on top in large font, measured temp is in tiny font at the bottom. I understand the logic of swapping font size, but this is still somewhat confusing and perhaps at least the order (measured temp on top, set temp at bottom) should remain consistent. 

- measurement and target resolution of 1C of TRVs is much too coarse

The device itself has 0.1C resolution exposed throught the API; even if accuracy is significantly lower due to the placement near the radiator, there is no reason to hide this information as it is still useful in many scenario's. For instance to see a trend (is it going up or down?), or when you are feeling a little cold to estimate if the boiler is about to fire or if you should increase the target temp. Increasing the target by one full degree is quite a massive change though. Measurement should be shown at 0.1C resolution and setting the temperature should be at most in 0.5C steps.

- No indication of boiler activity

There is no way to see if the boiler is being triggered anywhere in the app. This should be visible on the home screen. There probably isnt another thermostat on the planet that hides this info.

- Only 1 measurement per zone

When multiple TRVs are used in 1 room, it would be useful to see all their measurements somewhere, not just the master. It would also be useful if we could average temperature readings of all devices and use that as trigger, rather than selecting 1 master. (It would be even more helpful if we could use cheap tado or third party zigbee/zwave/.. sensors that we can mount on the wall).

- Setting smart schedule is tedious when you have many devices and zones.

You should be able to copy/paste settings from other zones or create templates that you can assign to various rooms. The interface itself is also rather clunky when you have many or short entries or entries in the evening, which are invisible until you click them. Why not show this vertically?

- Log files 

There is no logging of data. All data (measured and target temps, humidity, working modes, boiler activity, ..) should be available in csv or some other format for analysis, if not on the phone app then at least on the website. 

- Chart

The existing chart is not very good. It opens in full screen (why?) in landscape mode, whereas the main app does not even support landscape mode, meaning you have to rotate your phone. You can not zoom on the chart, or scroll, you can not select a point on the chart to get actual numerical values (on android) and both X and Y axis divisions are so coarse you can only guess at the values at some time. The charts dont align from one day to the next. We should have infinite scroll and zoom like any financial chart on the internet. The charts do no show when the boiler was on for users with on/off boilers. Ideally the charts would show when heating power was requested both by the current zone and by any another zone, using colors to differentiate. There should be a way to easily navigate from the chart of one zone to another zone, that does not involve: swiping up to get the navigation bar, going back, rotating the phone, selecting another zone, clicking the chart icon, rotating the phone again. Perhaps allow combining multiple rooms in one chart. Minor bug: the weather overlay toggle works in the opposite way of the other overlay toggles, being shown when the button is white, rather than grey.

- Missing trend indication on homepage

It would be helpful to see a trend per zone, for instance if a zone is being heated or cooling down. This could be done by having a simple 1hr chart in the background of each tile or some arrow or similar visual clue. If a chart is shown, a consistent scale is important to differentiate tiny fluctuations that are not important from actual significant temperature changes.

- Away detection and Open window popups

There buttons should be available, always. Current method is unacceptable. Manual control over home/away is probably the most requested feature on the forum. There has to be a manual override. For when working in the garden, when I leave the house without phone, when my phone is forgotten at work, when a non family member is in the house, when the phone battery is dead, .... I would suggested 4 modes of operation the use can choose:

• On (home mode)
• Auto (auto assist, current default mode)
• Away (override geolocation either for current user or for everyone)
• OFF 

API control over home/away would be very helpful too to integrate Tado in home automation.

- Air comfort

This tile shows a lot of info, but omits relative humidity. It would be helpful if Tado showed when would be a good time to open windows to reduce inside humidity by calculating and comparing absolute humidity inside and outside. Ideally it could even look at the smart schedule to suggest a good time that doesnt cost too much energy.

Settings page

- Overall navigation is confusing.

The home page has a tile per zone, but does not let you access any settings besides temp. The settings page has the same list of zones, this should be available from the temperature tile in the home page by clicking a wrench icon. The relation between zones and devices is not very clear, since rooms does not show devices, but the device list does show rooms. Some settings like temperature offset would be more logical to assign to a device than a room and finding that setting is harder than it should be.

- list of useless options

Weather adaptation does nothing. Smart schedule does nothing. Air comfort does nothing. Stats and analytics does nothing. Why are these prominent options in the setting menu? The fact you feel the need on those pages to explain where the relevant information or setting (if any) actually is, is evidence that the app needs a redesign. Maybe these pages should be turned in to "tips" that are shown to new users, but they are pointless to people familiar to the app and just end up being confusing and hiding actual setting pages.

kvandaalen

I have the same issue. Promissed that this would be fixed in 2017. Still no fix :(

Mikkelzzz3

Hi everyone
I have a flat with 4 rooms and radiators. I keep all the doors open, and the flat is very open. Therefore, while I have several rooms in Tado, I always have the rooms on the same schedule (except bedroom). In the evening I might want to adjust the heating a bit.

So, I am really missing an option to change the temperature for all rooms at once. If I want to lower/raise the whole flat temperature by 1 degree spontaneously, then I have to open each individual room to adjust the temperature. Isn't there a way a setting can be made that says "Change all rooms to x temperature"?

That would be very appreciated!

Ziggy

It would be great to use Smart AC control units in summer to control air cooling and in winter to give temperature readings to Radiator thermostats.

bobbywise

It’s a workaround, but you could use google home / assistant to do this by saying : set all thermostats to N degrees.

BalajiBalasa

Is there a way for a multiuser geofencing to turn or turn off the heating for a particular zone.

This is a extremely important feature for HMO or Multi room setup , tado is this possible ??

BalajiBalasa

Currently I can add a device only one room or a zone. Can I create a virtual zone comprising of One or more rooms and adding a particular user to that virtual zone for geo fencing ,, tado is this possible.

jamese8

Yes please. Its odd that the thermostats dont have a possibility of external temp sensor probe connection. Its not at all technically difficult, and quite a common set up to have just bathroom or kitchen with a small area of electric underfloor heating.

christian_delen

I have an AC/heat pump (Mitsubishi Electronic) that we use exclusively for heating (in Sweden). The internal thermostat keeps the temperature on an even level throughout a day, but as it is placed inside the AC unit it does not manage to compensate for large variations in the outside temperature. When the outside temperature gets below the freezing point I have to increase the goal temperature on the heat pump with several °C to compensate for the increased challenge to the house.

I have tried the thermostatic mode on the Tado control which turns the heater on and off, but the result is a much coarser operation by the AC. Either it runs on a fixed (probably high) intensity or it is off. The room and house temperature and comfort varies a lot more than in non-thermostatic mode. The AC internal controller regulates the operation intensity (for instance fan speed) according to the temperature gap, which is preferred.

I wish the Tado control to just tells the AC/heat pump unit to increase or decrease the goal temperature a degree or so when needed over longer durations, but lets the heat pump control the operation intensity. For instance, the Tado AC Control thermometer discover that the room temperature has been one °C to high the last hours (the heat pumps heats more than necessary due to higher outside temperature) and then tells the heat pump to decrease the goal temperature by one °C. Is that possible or something you plan?

Thanks in advance for any response!

RemiV

Please fix this indeed!

SunilAMS

Customers set aside time for system installs. If, partway through the install, they are suddenly told they have to wait two business days for instructions, they have to set aside more time to do the install.

I understand why you don't provide instructions to customers that have not purchased the system. However, you could at least indicate before purchase if custom instructions are required.

Allow customers to select their configuration of existing thermostat/boiler and make a request if instructions will be instantly available or not. That way, a customer can properly sync scheduling of both purchase and installation of the system with the receipt of the instructions.

This is especially important if, for instance, a customer wants to install on a Saturday. On that Saturday, they'll find out it will take two business days for instructions, which means at best another four days (Saturday/Sunday/Monday/Tuesday) before installation is possible.

Chemado

This is a very record failure of Tado. It is supposed to be an intelligent system that allows you to optimize your system, which also communicates in OpenTherm and does not allow you to stipulate a climate curve to regulate the maximum impulse temperature of the radiators.

Since winter has begun I notice that the radiators are overheated.

I am very disappointed. I have just discovered this and the only solution is to install Tado as a relay system (the boiler is capable of adjusting the impulsion temperature by means of an optional external probe that I have installed), and lose the advantage of having a modulating boiler. Besides not being able to control the hot water.

As a note I will say that the thermostat of the mixma brand of the boiler (Baxi) that costs 50 euros allows to adjust the climatic curve.

I was very happy with the Tado system, and I was recommending it to my friends and family, but this has left a bad taste in my mouth.

I think Tado should implement a climate curve adjustment.

PeterMarc

I am unable to use non-thermostatic control of my AC because the only set of IR commands for MHI AC units does not correctly send the temperature setting when the unit is operating in Heating mode - it always sends a fixed temperature of 10 C.

Can this be corrected please.

PeterMarc

I have just installed a Smart AC controller in my bedroom.

It beeps every time it send a command which wakes me up.

Please add a setting to suppress this beep when required

Thank-you

BillGallop

While Homekit is aware of the temperature of a room, through Smart Thermostat and Smart Radiator Thermostat, and I can ask Siri what the temperature of a room is, the thermostats are not exposed to Homekit as sensors.

As a result of this I can’t create a Homekit automation based on the temperature detected by the thermostat, e.g. turning on a fan if it gets too warm.

KaiUno

I thought this would be a feature already when I got the system... I share a house with a central boiler, we each have our zone and we have hugely different "away" times. My housemate has working hours that defy setting up a smart schedule. So now I still have to manage her heating when I'm at home and she is not.

mfcc

Well, I think both options should be available.
Someone knows if the beta version allows it already?

Creese

The ideal temperature is too high for me, so I am constantly being 'advised' to increase it.

18 or 19 is usually high enough for me, so could be have a setting to adjust the comfort level to individual levels?

Rathje

Why can't you in thermostatic mode set a goal temperature lower than the lowest cooling temperature.

In thermostatic mode the heating principle is to turn on the AC when temperature is below goal and turn it off when reached. My Panasonic AC has a lower limit of 16C. When it heats it simply gets command to heat with goal 30C, but will be turned off when the target temperature is reached.

So it would be perfectly possible to monitor the temperature and keep it above say 5C. When reached 4C turn on. When reached 6C turn off for example. This option could be very usefull in away mode.

I think this is logical bug at Tado. And a very easy feature to introduce.

Best regards

Lars

Denmark (where we heat more than we cool..)

Premke

I wake up at different times every day, and because I like to have a bit higher temperature in the bedroom when I get out of bed, I have to change my schedule everyday... 😱

It will be great if TADO can have access to my alarm clock app. In Tado app you will only setup the goal temprature when you wake up, or a time interval before the alarm clock for the heating to start with fix temperature.

For different users, there should be an option to choose their bedroom for which this funcion will start.

What do you think about it? It would make my life so mucha easier! 😴⏰

geo24yo

You can use clock app from google and in the alarm setings you have that option

christian_terp

Hi

I think it would be very informative if the temperature setup is shown as a line in the graph. This is especially interesting if thermostats were changed manually for later analysis.

This is just a example