For those that use Auto-Assist, do you think it saves you £25 per year?
I am considering subscribing to Auto-Assist. but am loathe to after spending best part of £600 installing the kit.
I am a little opposed to subscribing, mainly because the technology exists already within the app, and it costs Tado £0 extra to activate it. I've spent £600, I don't really want to be tied into a subscription.
for those of you that currently subscribe, do you think it saves you the £25 over the year in heating costs?
For those that use Auto-Assist, do you think it saves you £25 per year? 19 votes
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NoIt definitely less than £25 a year savings , but i decided on due to the comfort of not having to switch off heating when I leave home leaving the area set up on n geofencing and already driving. I did it for a year without the subscription.0
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Any savings always depend heavily on your own behavior before and after making the change. When you have made careful schedules and always manually turn off the heating (some time) before leaving home or opening a window, of course auto-assist will save you nothing. It may be more convenient and it may actually cost you more as the automation cannot predict you leaving the home and for how long.
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No
No savings for me and I've cancelled renewal. Reasons....
We are two retired adults and I'm the only one in charge of heating controls.
Heating is on 24x7 (subject to thermostats needs) with a finely tuned schedule per room to maximise comfort and minimise cost.
The house is rarely unoccupied (for long) and automatic geofencing is unnecessary. Manual control is sufficient.
Open window detection was mostly useless, detecting open window when somebody walked past a sensor or flapped a towel in the bathroom. More recently it doesn't seem to kick in much at all, or at least not that I've noticed. We don't need it.
The figures produced by Tado are mostly fictional. The Heating Activity stats simply don't reflect the truth. Not at all. For example, an "independent" thermostat might be in need of heating all day and all night, but will only receive heat when another active thermostat requests it. Even then, heat will only be received when the boiler is burning. There are times when heat is called for but the boiler is not burning gas. Thus you could see a very high demand for heating (e.g. 22 hours out of 24) when in reality the boiler was only alight for 4-6 hours.
Energy IQ stats are just as troubling. I supply meter readings to Tado on a daily basis. Last month Tado estimated my heating costs to exceed my entire gas consumption for the month. That's impossible to be true and therefore stupid. So what about showers and other hot water? I can get accurate half hourly/daily/monthly data from my smart meter. There is no value whatsoever to me from Tado's unsatisfactory guesswork.
As for savings, no doubt Tado saves money, but not through its own (not so clever) automation. It is through my own observation and education leading to adjustments to boiler flow/return temperatures and creatively setting up the system to be as efficient as possible through careful temperature scheduling and considered use of "independent" thermostats.
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Well, I am using Apple Homekit, and created two automation entries, one for “People arrive” and one for “People leave”. Based on the two automations the thermostat enters frost protection or turns on, or you can specify temperatures0
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Yes - a little
For me it has definitely saved money, but only because of my working from home arrangement. Tado allows me to have two rooms heated through the day whenever one of us is working from home, but will turn off the heating when we are not. This could be done manually of course by altering the schedules or manually changing setpoint for the weeks when no one is working from home, but before we had Tado installed we rarely remembered to do it. I think how much money you save will vary a lot from one house to another based on how the house is occupied and how diligent you are at manually adjusting your heating.
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NoI work from home now so I’m not using it. If I was back in the office daily then not having to switch to setback temps manually when leaving and returning would probably be beneficial though.
No other paid features are attractive to me. I’ve gotta echo @eezytiger’s comments on this one.0 -
Yes - a little
Yes - a little
Whether you believe the figures or whether the additional functionality is of use to you consider this - Tado would not exist without the revenue it generates through things like subscription services.
As one that works in IT - 'the cloud' is still just a bunch of servers sat in a datacenter somewhere in the world that costs money to run & maintain.
You all are part of this forum because you either have issues or requests to improve the product or service in some way - development costs money.
Moral of the post - without the income generated from subscriptions you would all be screwed!!
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No@M111CJN An interesting point and one I’m half in agreement and half against.
I’m in a similar industry myself and find this a hard one to know exactly where I stand personally. Subscription only models I’m 100% with you, one’s with high initial hardware costs I find it harder to justify the same reasoning.
Like I said interesting point but one with a very blurred line at the crossover of hardware and subscription services, when the two combine. Especially smart devices that require both hardware and cloud services to actually function.1 -
I agree wholeheartedly with @M111CJN
Once the hardware purchase is done there's no further income stream. I would prefer if the hardware was on subscription too even if it meant higher costs over time as it would cover development & maintenence
I worry that Tado doesn't have the long term income to survive0 -
I caaan't get geofencing to give consissstent reports as it is so I won't be spending on this.
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No
@M111CJN So famous 'cloud' does not really work well for home automation and many big players already realized that... Major Google outage meant some Nest users couldn’t unlock doors or use the AC.
Apple or Aqara therefore use local automation making their system more stable.
Using cloud just for the sake of’ pretending to be smart’ does not work.
Subscription model is the easiest way to get money from users without big own investment. Users often are ripped off by purchasing a lifetime license and realising a year later that their software will not work as the dev is moving into to a subscription model- example 1Password where the new 'cloud' service is a step back in terms of functionality and also security, but the dev doesn't care.
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Yes - a little
@rafm5 I mostly agree with you, and I'm a big advocate of the discussions in this forum about offline capabilities to mitigate against internet (or Tado) outages, along with a complete revamp of how schedules are curated so maybe they can be applied to individual devices, rooms, zones or complete home(s).
At the moment I'm using HomeKit rather than Tado to manage most of my heating. I'm able to use the scenes to group rooms together and then use logic in the automations so that when one room calls for heat, if another room is within a certain temperature threshold it will take advantage of the heating being on whereas when I had Tado managing each of my rooms I found as one Room's heat demand finished another room would require heating so my heating was on far more than it needed to be.
But back to the cloud discussion - where the cloud can bring real value is in data collected and the services that can be derived from that data.
There was a really good article on BBC News today (https://www.bbc.com/news/business-63511163), and while being quite a good advert for Tado there was a paragraph that really sums up what I mean:
"he accessed data from the thermostat online and plotted graphs that charted boiler activity against the changing temperature of a particular room. And when he upgraded the bi-folding door in his dining room to a triple-glazed model, the system instantly captured the difference that made."
Now imagine all that collective data in the cloud, Tado can use AI logic to start making recommendations to you on how to use and heat your home more effectively. That same data can be used to make your heating system more intelligent by really understanding the heating characteristics of the rooms in your home which would in turn aid things like weather compensation but as I said in my original post, these things take money and investment.
There is one final sentence from the article I will finish with... "Smart thermostats may struggle when users expect them to do all the work for them"
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