Let the user set the Price/KWh

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Let the user set the Price/KWh on the estimation tool
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  • Romeo
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    Please update with option to set the Price/KWh
  • GrayDav4276
    GrayDav4276 ✭✭✭
    edited November 2021
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    Hi @Romeo
    This feature is currently only a "Beta" feature at the moment.
    Hopefully 🙏 if Tado go ahead with this then it will have the option of the customer setting the appropriate price point.
    It should be noted that this feature is titled as a "Heating cost" estimator.....so if you have "hot water" or "gas cooker or hob"....then the "Heating estimation" is actually an estimation of total gas consumption. I can't see any way (at the moment) of extrapolating the "Heating" from the total......unless I've totally missed something.

    Note to Tado Admins......this is not a complaint.....merely an observation.
  • Rob
    Rob | Admin
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    @GrayDav4276 is right. Not officially launched just yet, and we are updating some features. This will be one of them if I'm not mistaken.

    As long as we don't have information from Smart Meters, we can only make an estimate on the historical tado° heating curve calibrated by your heating bills. If your heating energy source also includes other uses (gas: domestic hot water. Electricity: Every electric device) the estimate will be clouded. But, at least with gas/oil, the vast majority is used for heating, so the energy consumption estimate can still be rather accurate. As long as it's properly calibrated with multiple energy bills.

  • eezytiger
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    @Rob I am with Ovo, but my account is not officially linked with Tado since my Tado equipment was supplied by Amazon before I discovered the Ovo offer. I've been adding meter readings to Tado by hand on a daily basis, but on a couple of occasions in the past few days the meter readings have already been populated for the day before I can enter them manually.

    As pleased I am at this automation, I don't understand how it is happening without an official link between accounts. Is there secret handshaking between the apps in the background. I'm happy if there is, just puzzled by the surprise magic I've witnessed. Can you explain? Thanks.

  • Rob
    Rob | Admin
    edited November 2021
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    @eezytiger

    tado° regulates your heating. For each room you can find a graph with the historic heating activity of a specific day. From today, but also from 8 months ago or something entirely different. As long as you had tado° in that room in that day. We know the length and the intensity of the heating. So we have an 'area under the curve' for each room with tado° devices for the period that room exists in your tado° app.

    This 'area under the curve' tells us a relative heating activity. We can say that, for example, you heated your living room 20% more on Monday than on Tuesday. We can also say: the 'area under the curve' for all rooms combined in October was, for example, 30% more than it was for all rooms in September.

    These numbers are abstract though. If we know that you heated 30% more in October than you did in September, we still don't know anything about KWh or m3 or €. So, we need to calibrate this data with your heating bills. Let us say you have entered a heating bill from August 31st and one from September 30th. The difference between those two bills is the energy you used in the month of September, correct? Let us assume the difference between those two bills is 100 KWh. Then, your energy usage would be 100 KWh in September. Purely based on your bills. When tado° knows you used 30% more heating in October than in September, we can now predict that your energy consumption will be 100 KWh (based on your bills) * 130% (30% extra usage of October versus September) = 130 KWh in October.

    Does that make sense to you?

  • eezytiger
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    @Rob Yes, I understand what you are saying, although there are some issues with it which I'll come to in a moment, but my question was about Tado pre-populating daily meter readings correctly, but only on some days. If this is guesstimated from your calculations described above then it is working, but then I don't understand why the figures only appear occasionally. It isn't a big deal, but I'm a little curious.

    Now, regarding the graphs and the heating demands, this is where I have some trouble. I have nine radiators in total, with seven Tado TRVs fitted. There is a Tado Smart Wired Thermostat in the hall and a Tado Wireless Temperature sensor in the bathroom, both informing the wired thermostat zone controller. Neither of these radiators has a thermostat valve - they are both left open for pump overrun. This means that when any TRV (say the kitchen) calls for heat then both the hall and bathroom will also be heated, but Tado will have no record of these rooms being heated - unless they themselves ask for it. The hall is always overheated and never calls for heat. The bathroom radiator (a towel rail) does call for heat as it is undersized for the task, but also gets "free heat" when other radiators are on.

    Apart from all this, the boiler is oversized and produces too much heat for the room losses and radiator sizing, especially when only one or two rads are "on", plus hall and bathroom. Therefore, even when Tado is calling for heat from the system the boiler might be completely off, having reached maximum flow temperature (60C set) and shutting off the gas. It will then run on for five minutes, still not adding new heat to the system, and then sit idle for several more minutes in anti-cycling mode.

    So all of this means that there is a significant disconnect between what Tado imagines is going on and what is actually going on. Personally, with a smart meter taking measurements every 30 minutes, I find the true kWh and £ reported by my energy supplier to be the Oracle of truth, albeit with a one day delay before I see the numbers.

    It's not that there is no merit in the Tado graphs - they do have their part to play in understanding heating DEMANDED by Tado, but they do not accurately present heating SUPPLIED by the boiler.

    Does that make sense? :-)

  • Rob
    Rob | Admin
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    Sure, that makes sense. It's why we only have an estimation. It is not perfect, but it's the best we can do without other data. I think it can be quite useful to many users. Also note that with the data we use to calibrate (your bills), the situation with the heating we are not controlling was the same. So it's kind of a constant in our estimate.

    We are working on integration with smart meters as well, but this will not be implemented soon (if at all, no promises) due to the much larger hurdles. There are many different suppliers of these smart meters in our main markets in Europe and the UK and it's not always easy to cooperate with them. If we do achieve this integration, we can offer something better than the estimate we offer now.