support for multiple internet bridges
I've had contact with the support team, changed the location of the internet bridge 4 times, support team changed the frequency 4 times. Still I'm waking up to take a shower in 14° degrees with a child of 3 years old. This happens every day for hours at the time, connection gets losts and thus no heating.
I'm now having to buy another Internet bridge because the support team is assuming it will be better.
I think the appropriote solution would be to allow two internet bridges so you can hand-pick which thermostat should use a particular bridge. In my case it would allow me to have 1 internet bridge for my upstairs rooms, 1 internet bridge for my downstairs room/bathroom.
Please save me from an angry wife in the morning ..
house layout:
Comments
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Hi,
I've been using a solution where I have two internet bridges to cover the whole house. It just needs having two email addresses and creating two separate accounts - House1 and House2 or whatever. It's a pain, because I have to juggle with two different accounts to see all the rooms. But for example, I have one that works from Firefox, and one from Chrome so that I can see both parts of the house on the screen of my computer.
In fact, I have three different accounts, with a third one for a separate apartment that we have. Just needs three email addresses.
It would be trivial for Tado to fix this by just allowing multiple internet bridges on the same account. But well, they apparently have other priorities.
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Philips Hue has a similar issue, but their solution is simple: in the app, you can toggle between bridges, each having its own account. In fact, a third party app called iConnect Hue made a front-end overlay that seamlessly integrates both into one view.
While the (meshed) Zigbee protocol of Hue is more robust than Tado's wireless protocol, at least adding a second bridge would allow you to add range and overcome the 25 heating device limit.
Why is this so difficult, Tado?
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I too have had the range problem and tried adding another bridge. It worked but was highly inelegant and I eventually abandoned it in favour of relocating the bridge to give the best coverage possible albeit not perfect and still with the occasional dropout. Positioning the bridge as high as possible in the house and pointing downwards gave the best result. A repeater would be the ideal solution.
If you want to try the two bridge workaround you'll need to use 2 emails (or use a gmail account because that allows you to insert a decimal point into your address which will be accepted as being a different email but resolves to the same gmail account). You'll also need to use a cloning app like Parallel Space to enable running two copies of the Tado app on one device. If you can put your lesser used radiators/rooms all on the second instance then it makes management a little easier but it's still a kludge which really shouldn't be necessary.
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You can use 2x tado bridge withouth second email address.
Just register one bridge and on the other side of your house put in the LAN and electric second bridge, withouth any registration or adding to app.
It worked so by me. Have two bridges on different sides of my home and if I disconnect the not-registered bridge, the valve says "offline". If I connect him, i am on the valve online again. Maybe the two bridges communicates somehow together.
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@User22x : I'm sure many people would like to know more about using two bridges.
Did you manually pair the value to the second bridge, or did it automatically pick the strongest signal?
If you adjust the temperature on that one valve, can it still trigger the boiler connected via the other bridge?
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I paired all devices with one bridge. After installing the valve on the other side of home, it was "offline". I did not know, that two bridges are not working, so i put in the other side of home second bridge to electricity and plugged the LAN cable to switch. After doing that, the valve vas online and I can adjust the temperature with APP for all devices. So i did not paired anything, I just turned the second bridge on and plugged to same network.
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My system was the same. Felt like week signal between devices. If I moved all devices in one room all connected but moving back to other rooms, not connected ... support finally changed frequency on my system and my system is fast with only one bridge in the house... even behind my router on it's side ( not upright) so if you have connectivity issues, contact support. Change frequency. That's helped me. Now all mi devices have instant control ( 1 or 2 seconds maximum)
I hope that helps0 -
Has anyone else used the second bridge solution without a second email address / account?0
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So I bought a second bridge and as above just plugged it in. Seems to be working and have more connectivity than before. Think will leave for a few days - see how it goes and look to buy a 3rd for the other dead spot end of my house.
Note - all devices registered to the original bridge and no 2nd email address1 -
@tado - what do you think about this? Why is it working? can I add more bridges?0
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I can't really speak to the "why" part - but my guess would be that a tado bridge will just blindly transport any information seen on the wireless channel to the tado backend - and the tado backend doesn't care about from which bridge it was received…
So to answer your question "can I add more bridges?": Yes, as shown by other people in the community, you can set up more bridges in your home - but No, you cannot "connect" them to your tado account. They'll have to always just be there in limbo with no direct association with your tado home.
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What you guys describe here in a literal way; take a 'virgin' second internet bridge and just plug it in, this cannot work. I don't see how it could. The new bridge is not paired to anything. If this were to work, you would also be able to access tado devices from your neighbour.
HOWEVER, looking at User22x's account, I see something additional that has happened. Namely, the replacement of a bridge with a new one. A bridge replacement following the replacement steps in the app. What happens then is that the paring information and all that are copied from the old bridge to the new one. That way they become kind of like clones of each other. Now plugging that second bridge back in can have an effect.
Moreover, when you take a (radiator) thermostat that is not assigned to a tado account and pair it to the cloned 'old' (as in: also not in an account anymore) bridge, and only then add the thermostat or radiator thermostat to the app, it should work.
So why are we not promoting this? Because it is not designed for this, we didn't test for it, you need extra hardware (the second bridge) plus a location to plug it in for wired internet and we cannot predict what happens when the internet connection itself fails. The latter is not all that interesting when you only have radiator thermostats, but is interesting when you have a wireless receiver connected to the boiler that needs to be controllable by a thermostat. Also when the internet is down.
All this is something you can experiment with. I am sure it will help some people. However, as we have no insight in what happens our support department cannot support it and it requires the kind of user who is willing to test things. It requires trial and error. If you can accept all disclaimers I wrote, please do try and report back.
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@SteveIreland Exactly. Unplug the registered bridge, wait at least half an hour, check connection status of the heating devices.
Doing some research (as in; talking with some devs) told me that communication between heating devices is unknown. I especially mean rooms being able to call for heat at the zone controller. To what extent that will still work with the unregistered bridge is unknown. It probably will work, but will it work reliably? That is something we are sceptical about. Especially when the zone controller is connected via bridge A and the room device via bridge B. That's the main reason this second bridge topic is not something we actively propagate. Had it been so simple we would be able to sell more hardware, which is obviously in our interest.
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So I did nothing more than plug in 2 more bridges without formally adding them or turning off the first registered one. It seems to have solved the connectivity problems I have had. It’s been the summer so not tested calling for heat yet, but it does seem that new TRVs have to be added in close range to the registered bridge.
I am happy to experiment as otherwise my whole system isn’t reliable. I now need to get past the ten room limit (the other big drawback) and so will wire a wired thermostat in parallel and see what happens.1 -
This is working 100% for my setup which is very simple with no boiler control and simply multiple TRVs.
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