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Geofencing per room per person

My wife and I both work from home and have tado TRVs in our home offices. It would be useful if our individual rooms turned off heating when either of us leave the house.
So if I’m still at home my room could stay heated but if my wife left the house the geofencing could detect that she was out and could turn the heating off in her room.
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  • Was literally coming on here to suggest the same. Great improvement for the hybrid working age
  • Totally agree. I'm sure I requested this year's ago but can't remember my sign in.
    Lots of other threads requesting it. People working alternate weeks or days from home is really common now. Remembering to make manual alterations every few days is a pain.
  • Exactly P_W. Yesterday my wife was out all day and I was busy and completely forgot to manually turn off her room. A whole day of heating her home office that wasn’t needed.
  • SPT
    SPT ✭✭
    Geofencing relies on GPS to determine your location, so it might not distinguish between rooms in close proximity. Tado relies on user-defined zones rather than room-level accuracy.
  • It doesn’t need to distinguish between rooms in that way. It just needs to turn on different rooms depending on which person is at home.

  • SPT
    SPT ✭✭
    Ok, but what if I don't want the heating on because I happen to go to the office room to find some papers but took 10mins to find them. Tado does not know if you would ever want the heating on or not. Unfair as Tado can't assume this for you.

    Of course it needs to know what room you are in. My point is GPS won't be accurate indoors to know if you are in the kids bedroom or the master bedroom (assuming they are in close proximity) so again it's unfair to blame Tado for not building this feature.
  • What the OP was asking for was the ability to have heating turned on or off in different rooms depending on which person was in the house. Nothing to do with detecting which room anybody goes into.

  • SPT
    SPT ✭✭
    Yes I get that but how do you expect that to work???
  • GaryW32
    GaryW32 ✭✭
    edited October 2023
    Hi SPT
    It’s quite simple. If my wife’s GPS location is shown as away from home (and I’m still at home) then I want her office TRV to switch off the heating for her room only.
    Same for me and my room.
    It would be an option in the heating settings in the home offices to have geofencing associated with just one person instead of the two that are used to control the whole of the rest of the house.
  • SPT
    SPT ✭✭
    Right so if I understand correctly, you want rooms associated to user accounts on the app. That sounds like a niche feature because in my house I would not want our office linked to my wife's phone.
  • Yes, I’d like the ability to specify a room to only be associated with one user account for the purposes of geofencing.
    I agree that’s of no use to you if you share the same home office with your wife. But we’re fortunate enough to have separate rooms that we use for our home offices. I’m not sure if that’s niche but I think it would save heating costs for couples that have 2 separate rooms for working from home.
  • @SPT If the feature makes no sense to you, why not just ignore it and move on? Are you speaking in an official capacity on behalf of Tado?
  • CrogUk
    edited October 2023

    I requested this back in 2021, your description is more to-the-point and hope in 2023 Tado can work on this sort of feature. It appears old ideas were archived: The Big Idea Archive - Page 35 — tado° Community

    At present I disable geo-fencing as I work-from home so the heating is only on when the wife gets home! When it gets too cold I manually adjust the office temperature but would REALLY love some mroe intelligence especially considering kids growing up I would prefer their bedrooms to only heatup when they are actually home.

  • SPT
    SPT ✭✭
    @SalubriousCabbage - i work in software but not for Tado. Being specific and also realistic on what the devices can and can't do is really important. Personally I don't see how Tado will know if you're sat in the office or master bedroom. They don't use any proximity sensors nor do the TRVs communicate to the users phones.

    The only way I see this working is if the TRVs emit a beacon to the hub to then work out proximity but then the phone would need to be constantly looking for locations. It'll be too complex and run the batteries flat.
  • @SPT I’m afraid you have completely missed the point. It doesn’t need any proximity sensors or any ability to know ‘where’ a person is in the house. I’m talking about the existing capability of geofencing that knows when a member of the household is no longer at home.
    We just simply update the existing settings in tado to allow a designated room to have its AWAY mode dependent on a single person rather than the whole household.

    I’ll try to give a example
    Rooms 1,2,3 and 4 switch to AWAY mode if both user 1 AND user 2 have left the house.

    Room 5 switches to AWAY mode if user 1 has left the house

    Room 6 switches to AWAY mode if user 2 has left the house.
  • SPT
    SPT ✭✭
    Right, so @GaryW32 how does Geofencing know which room you are in if GPS accuracy is severely compromised indoors?
  • GaryW32
    GaryW32 ✭✭
    edited October 2023
    @SPT. Are you being deliberately obtuse? Please re-read my description of the requirement and suggested solution carefully and slowly. Never at any point has there been a requirement for Tado to know which room you are in.

    Rooms 1,2,3 and 4 switch to AWAY mode if both user 1 AND user 2 LEAVE THE HOUSE. <- this is current standard functionality.

    Room 5 switches to AWAY mode if user 1 LEAVES THE HOUSE <- this is standard functionally but only using one user account as the decision for away mode

    Room 6 switches to AWAY mode if user 2 LEAVES THE HOUSE <- this is standard functionally but only using one user account as the decision for away mode
  • samd
    samd ✭✭✭

    @GaryW32 Just so your model is absolutely clear, Room 5 is the Office of User 1 and Room 6 the Office of User 2!!!

  • @samd thank you. That’s a good addition to my explanation to hopefully make it absolutely clear.
  • SPT
    SPT ✭✭
    Ok I'll ask again, how does it know you are away? What technology does it uses to determine you are away from the house?
  • SPT
    SPT ✭✭
    "how does Geofencing know she was in room X for Tado to turn off Room X?" Is probably a better question...
  • @SPT Honestly, I give up. Life’s too short.
    Hopefully one of the other people on here that understand this simple concept can be bothered to try explaining to you.
    Good luck.
  • samd
    samd ✭✭✭

    One last 'go' for me...

    "how does Geofencing know she was in room X for Tado to turn off Room X?" Is probably a better question...

    ..because we will tell it! Instead of geoF being an 'all rooms' function, the request is to make it usable at a room level for those that need it. Phone A of User 1 will be tied to Office One etc

  • SPT
    SPT ✭✭
    So you're going to manually tell it you are in the office for it to turn off the office when you leave the house. Sounds like an edge case scenario. I would encourage Tado to leave this alone.
  • GaryW32
    GaryW32 ✭✭
    edited October 2023
    @SPT Do you even have a Tado?
    Try to imagine an app that by some kind of voodoo magic knows when two people leave the house and then miraculously turns off all the heating in that house. Can you picture that?
    Ok, now hold that thought and imagine instead that just one person left the house (maybe they went shopping or visited the zoo somewhere far far away) and the app had a setting that meant the heating in just that person’s home office room turned off whilst the rest of the house remained on for the person still at home.
    Can you picture that? Probably not.
  • samd
    samd ✭✭✭

    Oh really I can see why Gary gave up!! It would be a one-off selection for those users who have the need and would last until varied.

    I am out!

  • samd
    samd ✭✭✭

    Yes, I think most of us agree on that but once the diverted effort (see for example: https://www.tado.com/gb-en/smart-energy-tariff) has been effective in that direction, will they come back to pick up the pieces here??

  • samd
    samd ✭✭✭

    @GrayDav4276 You are probably right (again!) but I see no evidence of a new generation and wonder if the capital raised (50m?) is all being gobbled up in their smart energy approach and similar?? Only time will tell.

  • I have another more pressing example for the same feature. I've asked this multiple times over many years but it's still not a feature. I have three children who live with my ex wife most of the time. They each have their own bedroom at my house that needs heating when they are here (weekends mostly) but not all of them come all the time. What I want is for it to not heat their bedrooms when they are not in. This would also work in shared appartements where each tenant has their own heating zone. (Not zone as in it needs a separate boiler switch). Please please please fix this!