IQ for oil
I suspect you can't get it accurate but some idea is better then none. The energy IQ is useless to us oil customers, there I'm sure many out there that use oil.
Answers
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Agree, this would be great! Happy to help with beta (or alpha!) testing.
Measuring fuel oil consumption is extremely hard. One option could be to record estimated tank volume at a particular date and time. Doing so regularly over a period of time would allow the app to track usage.
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I support this request0
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Do boilers burn a fixed about of oil/hour
Could usage be calculated by time boiler is running?0 -
Yes, most boilers use a fixed volume of oil when firing. However, the picture is clouded because the max water temperature stat turns the boiler off and also the tado algorithm turns the boiler off part of the time when room temperature is close to the set point. The second thing is difficult to interpret because tado adds up the time the heating percentage is non zero. There is also no record of firing time for domestic hot water.0
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I agree with this, need to record litres of oil and last order price per litre. Then tally up date of reading with cost of oil and tell us the price. We do need to figure out how to mark our tanks with say 100L levels but in sure some bright spark has done that before. Then Tado could learn usage vs boiler fired up time over a time period of months up to a year then we are set until someone changes the boiler temp…0
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2 million oil boilers in the UK. And data entry is similar to gas meter; date and fuel volume. Consumption is from date of entry to next reading instead of up to last reading, but not hugely complicated.0
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I would like that too. Just moved to somewhere with oil, and also need to Tado. Never had oil before. It would be good to be able to track it, because those of us with oil need an estimate even more, because we don't have a meter. Those with a gas meter can easily track their usage.
I did try Boiler Juice Connected. But it only gives a reading of how much oil is in the tank, in litres and as a percentage. Unfortunately, it only does that once a month, and seemed to be wildly out, so I cancelled it almost immediately. At first it was saying I had less oil than I have, and then saying I more oil than I have.
I don't see how an oil boiler can use a fixed amount of oil when firing. It must surely use different amounts, depending on set flow temperature, return temperature, when it last fired, whether it's a condensing boiler or not.
I wonder how widespread oil boilers are in Europe as a whole. I don't suppose the impending oil boiler ban in 2025 will help with getting Tado onside on this one, for the UK at least. I'll be a bit stuffed on that one. I can't have insulation and heat pump because most of my house has lost of asbestos. I was hoping to just quietly improve the oil heating bit at a time, but heard about the ban of new boilers about 2 weeks after moving in.0 -
I've had a brain wave. I don't know if this could work. It's occurred to me that I could maybe just put a bill through Tado every time I have an oil delivery.
I set Tado to get its consumption data from bills. Then I set the unit as other, because the unit is litres with oil. It was annoying me that the graph insisted on showing only 14.something unit price, and when I switched to units it was saying m3, which is only used for gas. I wanted it to at least show me kWa. But in order to change it to kWh, I have to fill in the consumption field, just to change the graph. So I looked up on Google how many kWh per litre, and it says 10.35 kWh per litre.
What I'm wondering is if it would work to just put a bill through Tado each time I have oil delivered. Obviously, I would put the date of the delivery as the bill date. Then, say I have 500L of oil delivered, I put my consumption as 5175 kWh because 500 (litres) X 10.35 (kWh per L) = 5175 kWh. Then if the oil is 75p per litre (for example), put the unit price as 7.77p because 10.35 (kWh per L) X £0.75 (per L) = £7.7625.
I'm tempted to give it a try and see if it works, just to give me a rough idea. If it doesn't work at least I can see how many kWh I'm using and get my unit price closer to what it actually is. I can't get very accurate because Tado doesn't take my DHW into account, which is an old fashioned, indirect, vented cylinder. The cylinder is poorly insulated, and the bathroom radiator runs off it, and that doesn't have a Tado STRV on it yet.2 -
Very good at leased you have given it some thought for Tado to take on board! 👍0
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I am a UK based Tado user, heating a small industrial/office building using an oil fired boiler. One valve in each of 18 offices grouped into 10 ‘zones’ (the limit) by working hours in each rented office/location in building, how marred the occupants of that office are (!) etc. Building is two floors of 4,500 sq ft each. Seems to work, I am certainly saving a decent volume of oil. Major issue for me is the lack of strength of the radio comms, my building just about stretches the limit, but I get away with it with one or two offices losing touch from time to time. Responding to the last two messages above.
You sort of CAN have a meter, for a modest sum, and it works reasonably well. I fitted a Kingspan oil volume sensor on my tank (I think this is what boilerjuice uses but you can avoid being tied to them, they are not always the cheapest source of oil). These are available on line, Amazon etc. Very easy to instal (watch YouTube videos) but set up is fairly crucial. Of course you must tell it about your oil tank. You need the dimensions and understand the shape. I have mine about right now after a little trial and error. You then also tell it how often you want it to measure the volume. I wake up to a new reading every morning, on their iPhone app. True it rounds the number, after all that days temperate would cause fluctuations anyway, but over say a week or so you can see the volume drop, and over a month the drop will be pretty accurate. This is in litres, divide by 1,000 if measuring in cubic metres in tado. Multiply the price per litre by 1,000 for the cubic metre price. Enter say the weekly volume reading. Arrive at that by calculating the difference in opening and closing volume that week or month and add that to the running total, I started an imaginary meter at 0 and it slowly ticks up over the year. Reasonably accurate I feel, the results I get seem to stack up.0 -
After a year of doing the above - fiddling the Tado records to work with oil - and recording what the kingspan reading gives me on a daily basis, I get a pretty good feel for the cost and volume of oil used each month. Yes I would love tado to address this directly but I don't see any likelihood of this is oil boilers are not going to be replaced. I could share my data but it would be pretty meaningless to others I feel. Mine is a new boiler, just over a year old, and it DOES vary the amount of oil it is using depending on the demand from the Tado system, it clearly burns hard early on a cold morning, then more gently as it catches the temperature as it drops during the working day (remember that this is in an office environment). The graph shown is for today, in an office where the occupants seem to need to work in a sauna, none of the other offices called for heat today, so Tado was saving me substantially because 90% of the radiators in the office block were kept firmly off, without anyone trying to adjust the heating in their offices. I now have a total of 10 rooms (having combined several to keep within Tado's limits) and control 25 heating devices in total, again, keeping to the maximum that will operate. My only real complaint is the dropping off of the connection, which happens fairly regularly with certain offices, but this new way of still running the schedule even when off line (see elsewhere) should substantially reduce this as an issue going forwards. Having used £4,500 of oil in 2023 I am confident that by the use of Tado I can make a worthwhile saving. Maybe one day upgrade to the x-system valves, but not at current prices, makes no sense.
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