Early start for radiators

Sarayna

I tried early start in normal rooms with radiators and found the early start begins excessively early (like 4 hours!) and was advised this feature can only be used for very slow systems like underfloor heating. Pity it cannot learn over time how long it takes to heat the room, take outside temperature into account, and start slightly early (like 20 minutes) to hit the correct temperature at the correct time. The instructions imply it already does this but 2 separate support/help chat people have told me it does not.

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Franita

Tado deleted all discussions about Early start early this year. Apparently there were too many. But meanwhile, the 1999 Honeywell Chronotherm IV still does this better than Tado!

Zog

tado are now actively advertising the early start in the app - does anyone know if it actually works now? (ie measures how long the room takes to warm up to work out how early to turn on)

Having looked at the heating graph on the app it's hardly complicated to have a good guess at the warm up time - doesn't really take an AI, just a simple review of the recent temp rise rate. In my house it's about 0.1C per minute so just multiplying the temp difference (requested to current) tells you how many minutes early to turn the valves on.

I've currently had to put multiple schedules in at different temps to imitate the early start but, as the minimum schedule is 15minutes, this just ends up with the valves opening and closing multiple times - which is terrible because they are so ***** noisy!

paul0000

I tried it last winter, had the same experience as you .. rooms starting to heat between 3-4hrs before scheduled heat time. Probably cost me a LOT of oil before I realised what was happening. Now I've just adjusted my schedules to fire up rooms 15 mins before the family are typically up and about (and no complaints).

Great idea, but I'm guessing the logic/code was flawed.

IanRJ

Installed Tado a couple of weeks ago. Disappointed to find early start starts up 3 hours or so before set target time and doesn't appear to learn the required heating curve. 15 years ago I installed my previous controller an IHC Dataterm which learnt and very efficiently implemented "Early Start", without the aid of internet weather information. I would say that Tado's current implementation of Early Start is barely fit for purpose. Let's hope this important feature is improved quite significantly soon.

davidlyall

I believe Early Start does work well with the Smart Thermostat/Wireless Temp Sensor but not with the TRVs. Tado really need to remove the option from TRVs and stop advertising that it's a feature.

rafm5

To make this feature usable tado° should be able to identity your heating and pick an appropriate action - different for underfloor heating system, different for radiators. Not sure how does the existing early start work and what's the logic behind it, but I would recommend the good old fashion manual adjustment rather famous tado° 'algorithms' ;-)

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davidlyall

Mind you, at least it's not like my Warmup 4iE that I use for electric underfloor heating in my conservatory. It's started doing early start all by itself even though the option is turned off! I can get it to stop by refreshing the schedules but that only lasts a few days. Their support has not been helpful.

On the Tado Early start, I don't think it needs to care about what type of heating you have. It only needs to learn how quickly the heating can warm the room. It's basic really as the room will have a fixed heat loss level and a fixed heat gain level unless sometime is changed e.g. better insulation, larger radiators

andyblac

I got an official response form Tado˚ regarding this

Tado˚: "Hello,

Thank you for contacting us.

I am afraid that the Early Start has been designed for underfloor heating which is much slower heating than the radiators.

Kind regards,

Natali"

Me: "ahh, OK, is there nothing you can do at your end to adjust timings ?"

Tado˚: "Unfortunately, no, you will need to turn it off."

rafm5

@andyblac In this instance I would expect this option to be disabled for other users, or at least the necessary statement should be added to 'Early Start' tab.

andyblac

@rafm5 I have suggested that "Early Start" to be hidden from Rooms that only have a SRT as their measuring device to level 1 support, they have taken it on board.

Rob

Actually, the comment from Natali is false. Early Start has not been designed for underfloor heating. The early start feature assumes a heatup gradient that resembles a relatively modestly sized radiator in respect to the size of the room. Something that is much faster than typical water based underfloor heating and much slower than a maybe somewhat oversized modern radiator.

It assumes a heating source that adds roughly 1.5 degrees per hour to the room temperature when heating. If your heating source resembles this somewhat, then early start will work properly with its default settings. If not, the estimation is off. It starts too late for UFH and too early for well sized/oversized radiators. I frequently see relatively decent estimations in larger rooms with radiators, and relatively bad estimations in smaller rooms (bedrooms, bathrooms) with radiators where the radiator is relatively large in respect to the room size.

In all honesty, this has annoyed me personally for a while and I too would like to see a smarter function. Presets, a slider to make it more/less aggressive, a better learning function, anything to improve it. I have mostly seen this feedback in the Dutch speaking market, and thus am pleased to see it here as well. As few people complain about it, it is not really seen as a priority. With more votes the argument becomes stronger.

andyblac

@Rob "Early Start" seems to work quite well with WTS, I have it enabled on 3 rooms with WTS, and they all start at different times between (1.5 hours to 30 mins) before Schedule start time,, and after a week of having this enabled it now judges when to kick in Early Start to reach target temp at scheduled time pretty much spot on. It is just SRT do not seem to learn how to tune this.

Also just a quick note also in the Web App if you click on the room tile, it shows you that it was "Early Start" that is calling for heat, but in the iPhone app it does not.

example from Web App.

in the iPhone you do not see the text "Early start for xxxx"

MGo

Adding my voice to this. Woken at 4am coincidentally, to find boiler on, and discover early start is heating rooms 3hr early, when half an hour needed. I thought these kinds of failed features had been worked out of the Tado app a couple of years ago, really disappointed that this is still essentially broken. God knows how much money I've wasted over past year using this feature, makes a mockery of Tado efficiency claims, and really dents my trust in how serious they are. This feature needs fixing or removing.