[Released with Offline Schedule] Offline notification

Dutchman

Note from tado°:
With tado°'s Offline Schedule (requested on the community for V3+ and always available for tado° X), a text block appears in the app confirming tado° is offline. This is not a notification, but it is a way to inform users when this occurs.

Original Post:
My Internet Bridge went off-line and I didn't realise for hours. A simple reset was all it took to fix the issue, which I could have done way sooner if I'd realised.

Tado sends other notifications, like a thermostat needing batteries.

I would like Tado to send me a notification, either push-notification in the app, or email, when my internet bridge has been off-line for more than say 2 minutes.

samd

@Dutchman Would tado know?

royi

If connection to the internet is lost. How will the bridge communicate by email or in the app.

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mperedim

I presume that Tado does know. If you go to the app you can see the Internet Bridge under devices, as well as its status (normally "Connected"). So at the very least the smartphone app could provide a notification on the phone.

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stefbishop

I had just this incident yesterday and wished the app had notified me. In my case, the power to the bridge had got disconnected during some rewiring, so my fault.

I raised the matter with Tado, but they have referred me to here, with no suggestion they might do anything about it.

In answer to the point above about notifications not working if the internet is down, most people would have the app on a smart phone and expect the notification to come there. Most smart phones detect the availability of the internet over Wifi and will switch to Mobile data if available.

It would also be nice to know of a list of all the incident types that give rise to a notification. And also a list of possible incidents that don't! I've never had one notification.

JoSoT

Just found out my devices were offline since Tuesday 9th at arond 10:38. ALL of them. I had to remove the batteries or power cord on all of them to reconnect.

No notification whatsoever. Though in the app a red dot was showing that all was doen. Why no notifications. And better yet. Why was everything down. Internet was connected and I am very sure, because my firewall app does tell me when internet goes down.

This realy is not what I would expect when you have a "notification" part on the app and have to give access to the app to send notifications.

Please TaDo. This needs to be addressed.

Sidney

Please Tado, this would be great!
Clearly the app does know that the devices are offline, there is a red dot in there when you go into the app, and as the OP says, there are other notifications pushed just fine.

It's infuriating that the first thing you know about it is when there is no hot water…. :(

KDB

I can't understand why this isn't trivial to add to the app?? Can anyone from Tado respond?
It's so frustrating to only find this out by the house being either too hot or too cold. The app "knows" that a device is offline. Why can't it notify me?

thefern

I get my bridge and receiver disconnect randomly maybe once a month. It happened again this morning so I thought I'd check the forums as it is surprising this functionality doesn't exist.

I actually believe this is trivial to add to the app. The app and Tado servers both know there is an issue. A simple push notification shoudl be sent similar to any other notification - I would estimate a few hours of dev time max. Even better would be a HomeKit sensor (and api flag) so we can run automations off the back of it - but that would be a (a bit) harder but make the power users happier.

@Emcee any way you can nudge the dev team here as you've been so helpful elsewhere - that push notification would be so good.

cdmstr

I don't think this is as trivial as expected.

Sending a push notification that a Tado device other than the bridge is offline, is definitely trivial. The bridge could handle the detection and push via API. I was about to post the same suggestion.

Proactively notifying users that their bridge is offline is a different prospect. If the bridge is offline it obviously can't send a notification. So for Tado to alert on this, the connectivity check would have to be made from the server side on a regular basis. Considering Tado has millions of customers, to poll every one of those bridges every x seconds or minutes would represent a massive increase in cloud and network consumption. We already know (from the offline schedule thread) that Tado's cloud burst capacity is limited, because that's what causes the delay in execution at the peak default heating schedule times.

The best solution here would be for a push notification if the bridge hasn't made an API call at the time of a scheduled heating change. I assume that could all be done server side with a couple of queries and a push.

Something to bear in mind - the behaviour most of us are used to with regard to offline IoT devices is the Ring doorbell / camera style instant notification that your device is offline. Doing this requires for all customers requires significant computer resources. Companies like Amazon have the AWS resource to throw at this because they own the platform. Tado, on the other hand, has to pay for compute resource. 1 extra API call for each one of 2 million customers adds up to significant cost, fast.

thefern

Suggest keeping it simple as it would be easiest to implement and not increase network traffic. Do it all client side as the app knows what is and isn't connected.

Saying that, just opening my app pings Tado servers 14 times. Suspect alerting on such status as a push from the cloud would be minimal extra traffic.