Kit required for multiple (4) zone valves and single boiler

jbakermk

I've asked the support team this question via the 'chat' facility and was disappointed to not get a straight answer, so I hope the community can help.

I have a Worcester Greenstar 40CDi system boiler connected to four zone valves serving different zones in the house. Each zone has a wired LCD roomstat to control multiple on/off times against a given temperature. When one or more zone requires heat, the boiler switches on, the relevant zone valves open and the rooms heat up as expected.

Multiple zones are clearly a good idea to save money. Why heat some bedrooms during the day when the family are at work? But I appreciate this is hard to retrofit and can only realistically be built out if fitting a new central heating system.

The boiler also has a fifth zone (as such), which heats the hot water tank sitting adjacent to it. There's a simple two way controller adjacent to the boiler which acts a full on/off for heating and a timer for the hot water. (It could provide a timed on/off for heating but there's no point as the room stats perform this function.)

In a perfect world, I'd like to simply replace the room stats with wifi units that can be programmed via a phone application, but what appears to be a really simple soliution does not appear to be supported by tado (any other suggestions welcome).

What tado kit is required to replace the four room stats and maintain four zones controlled by the tado phone application?

I can see that I probably require a wired starter kit (v3), and I assume wired thermotats, but I don't understand if the tado controller can deal with four zone valves driven by separate thermostats?

johnnyp78

Tado doesn’t make any Wi-Fi units at all, all of its products apart from the internet bridge work on the 6lowpan protocol.

In your case it sounds like four Tado wired thermostats would be fine, provided you don’t want Tado to control the hot water as well. In that case you’d also need a wireless receiver to replace the two way controller.

jbakermk

Thank you. So a tado controller can manage four zones, but can't manage hot water too?

I'm expecting to be removing all existing controllers and ideally I only want to fit one tado controller, or it becomes complicated and expensive.

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jbakermk

That's what I'm trying to do. The documentation surrounding multiple zones is poor.

johnnyp78

Not sure what you mean by a ‘Tado controller’. Zone controllers are Tado devices which physically link to a zone valve or boiler to call for heating, and can be either wired thermostats or a wireless receiver. Hot water control can only be done by a wireless receiver. You can have multiple zone controllers in a system but only one wireless receiver.

jbakermk

Thank you. So the tado solution in a wired device that replaces room stats, and hence there is no controller/hub (I suspect that I am confusing other systems) that replaces an existing multi-zone controller sitting adjacent to a boiler. That controller essentially becomes redundant: leave it set to continuous for all zones, or ask a professional to remove it?

To remove four thermostats, buy a v3 starter kit and three additional wired stats, that will all pair with the Internet bridge?

It's a shame the hot water control requires the wireless unit.

johnnyp78

Yeah I think you’ve got the idea. The only hub as such on Tado systems is the internet bridge, which sends instructions to and from Tado’s servers. All Tado devices communicate with it (which can be a drawback in a big house).

I think starting with wired thermostats is a good idea, you can always add hot water control later.

limeyard

Your proposed system sounds like mine. I did a major refurb when I bought this property twelve years ago and used an existing combi boiler as a system boiler. A Drayton LP112 is set to send heat to the hot water cylinder for about 30 minutes twice a day via one 'zone valve' and keeps the heating permanently on via three other zone valves, each controlled by a wired thermostat. I recently replaced the Honeywell 907 programmable thermostats with wired Tado stats and it works like a charm.

So I have three wired stats and an internet bridge which is plugged into a switch on my wired LAN (close to the geographical centre of the stats). All the heating control - config, settings, schedules, etc. is done through the Tado app on the mobile and/or the PC.

Hope this helps.