The Big Idea Archive

This is a small quality of life suggestion.

I have equipped my house with Tado Smart Radiator Thermostats in all rooms. When manually adjusting the radiator thermostat target temperature by hand, (turning the white freely-spinning plastic ring) they turn clockwise for hotter, and turn anti-clockwise to go cooler.

This is the OPPOSITE of how most standard (non-smart) radiator thermostats work. (Clockwise for cooler and anti-clockwise for hotter.)

Like many people, my family and I all have ingrained muscle memory from a lifetime of living with standard central heating. This means that every time we adjust a Tado radiator thermostat, we turn it the WRONG way at first, then have to turn it back to the right setting. This is annoying as it happens every time we adjust a radiator.

May I suggest that Tado offers in the TRV settings menu an option to reverse the direction of adjustment for the hand control knob?

Thanks RedTom

I mentioned in a different thread that my tado TRV batteries are still going strong after a year or so. Additionally I rarely hear the TRVs changing setting unless I am looking for it and when I do they are certainly not noisy.

These two issues may be the same underlying problem. If the valve is harder for the motors to adjust, they are likely to be noisier AND reduce battery life

It would be very useful to let the Wireless Temperature Sensor to activate the heating/bolier alone in a room without any smart radiator valve/thermostat.

For example, in my 3-room flat I have one only room where a radiator is present but a radiator valve/thermostat cannot be installed because of spacing issues, whether in the other two rooms regularly installed thermostat and radiator valves/thermostats are present. When I try to raise the temperature in that specific room where only the wireless temperature sensor is present, the heater/boiler is not activated by the system (thus instead heating is successfully enabled if the settings is requested via HomeKit/Apple Home app/Siri command instead of using the Tado app, losing the smart programming and auto-assist features for that room). The desired and expected behaviour in this specific scenario would be to activate the heating leaving the radiators off in the other rooms, when applicable.

I read that some other users were able to obtain this feature contacting the support and letting them configure the devices remotely, but this should be able to be configured by the end-user too (maybe in the case or future reconfigurations of the devices).

@TheShark , Hi there I have the exact same setup you have 2 Smart Thermostat controlling 2 zone valves. I was wondering if you managed to resolve the issue? I'm planning on purchasing radiator valves for all my radiators but before I do I want to ensure this works. Thanks

OK, this has been done by Lara from the Support Team creating a zone and mapping the wired thermostat as the main regulator of the zone for the entire home! This feature is shown in the web interface only and when trying to edit it, the website tells to contact the support because that feature is still under development. Instead, the feature is completely hidden in the smartphone app.

Once the feature development will be finished, this will be a useful enhancement.

I am having issues no heating. Ticket open with tech support

Please bring back Teach Tado

Hi @AndrewM,
I understand what you are asking for.....but I suspect that Tado are likely to be unwilling /unable to achieve these changes, at least in an acceptable timescale....Tado seem to be notoriously 'slow' to activate 'substantial' technical upgrades.....unfortunately.
Assuming that you have a mobile phone App.....then you can always 'turn on' your heating and hot water from your holiday location or on your journey home 🏡. That's what I have done in the past. I don't rely on the 'geofencing' mode....as far as I'm concerned it's just a sales gimmick.

Could not agree more. It starts me that Tado wouldn't race to fix this to grab more market share. They are losing out to Evohome at the moment because of this.

I have 3 heating circuits and one hot water, wired up to individual valves on separate pipe circuits. I am lucky in that for all of these circuits, I can use wired thermostats if I want to given how long ago it was all set up by the previous owner (although this is not ideal given the locations that some of these are in, so I am using one of these with a wireless one).

It's got to be only a software change - why on earth would you restrict to just one?

And the documentation is awful - it says on tado website that you can have one wireless receiver and one extension kit. It seems they don't mean that - careless wording.

Configuring Smart Radiator Thermostats to work with multiple heating circuits (e.g. separate upstairs and downstairs heating circuits, with each circuit controlled by a Smart Thermostat) is possible, but you will need to contact Tado technical support to correctly configure the system. It is not possible to do the complete configuration via the App.

I have two heating circuits controlled by two Smart Thermostats and I have gradually been increasing the number of Smart Radiator Thermostats. Each time I add a new Smart Radiator Thermostat I have to get in touch with Tado and have them link the new Smart Radiator Thermostat with one of the Smart Thermostats.

Without Tado's intervention the new Smart Radiator Thermostat will connect to the system ok, but it may or may not link to the correct heating circuit. Which circuit it connects to seems random, there might be some logic to it, but I have not been able to work out what it might be (and Tado support have said that there is no way for the user to do this).

Tado support always tell me that it is on their job list to add this functionality to the App, but they have been telling me that for a few years!

I do feel it is a significantly negative feature that my heating appears now to depend quite critically on a connection to tado servers. I do understand tado objectives and the commercial reasons for them, but ultimately, it is one matter to provide additional useful services via your servers but quite another matter to do so by increasing the dependency on yourselves for even the basic product functionality – with no real gain to you, I suspect. If more logic was built into or implemented in the hub, you could still request our data and add value by providing services that customers need/want. Alternatively, you could make available a mini server local app to allow customers to use a pc or phone, etc, to fulfil the Smart Schedules, Wall Stat (?) functionality as well as some configuration locally (and still send you telemetry data).

People normally purchase heating/plumbing equipment hoping for a relatively long life, and while excessive dependence on proprietary systems is currently trending, most technical people I know (and others who understand) do not feel that after a significant capital outlay the customer should still experience what are basically unnecessary risks. Essentially, if not connected to your servers, it would appear that no functionality remains in your product that cannot be provided by the original mechanical TRVs, even without batteries! We all love tado and wish them well, but if anything happ;ened to them, our not inconsiderable capital investment in tado components risks going down the drain.

I hope this makes sense and that ways can be found to reduce some of the less necessarily critical dependencies on an internet connection and on your servers.

Jerry

Just installed 7 TRVs and noticed the heating coming on a few hours too early. Looks like I'll disable early start as its a waste of time.

Not sure moving from Nest was the best decision. Hopefully Tado make some improvements

Same issue here. Recently purchased TRV's for all of the bedroom radiators, set them to 7am start with early start enabled. Everyone was then woken up at 5 this morning when the heating switched on and the radiators jumped into life. I've disabled early start and just rescheduled for 20 mins earlier. Let's see if that's good enough in the morning.

Hi, can you please let me know if it’s possible to:

1) get the current heating (or cooling) states, from A/Cs, thermostat, valves

2) pause that for n minutes

3) return to the previous heating/cooling states

Hi there,

I've been on the iOS beta programme for some time now, and was hoping to see some improvements on the app, but I've not really seen anything.

I think the app has some real UX problems, the main one being the fact that there are waaaay too many clicks needed to get even the most basic tasks done.

To change the temp in a room, I have to :

1) Click on a room

2) Click on the 'switch'

3) Slide the switch up

4) Click on the tick

5) Click on the back arrow to get back to the home screen if I want to change another room

Note that both the tick and the back arrow are hard to get to on a larger iPhone because they are just out of 'thumb reach' when holding the phone with one hand.

Why not just have this:

For quick setting:

1) Clicking on a room toggles between on (set to previous temp) or off

If you want to change the temp, press and hold to get a slider/access to the schedule/stats. When you are in this 'deeper' area, get rid of the tick - there is no need for it. The back arrow would suffice.

Also add a swipe right that would do the same as clicking the back arrow. Then you don't need to struggle to reach it. This is a standard iOS app feature, so is used in many apps and people are used to doing it.

Turning on the hot water is also a pain. You have to click on the water icon, click again, then swipe up the switch, then click back. Why not just toggle on/off with the first click. Press and hold can get you to a settings screen to set the schedule. Or at least remove the need for the 2nd click to get to the toggle.

Managing schedules is a total pain. You should be able to copy from other rooms. You should also be able to put rads in zones so that you can set a schedule on a zone as a whole rather than every individual rad.

There are loads more little things that could be done to make the whole experience so much better, and I would love to see some progress on that.

Rob.