Why Tado?

DesignerLondon

Ive recently installed a full Tado system inc. hot water. I am now regreting doing this. Instead of making life easier, and lowering my heating costs it seems to have done the opposite.

Pre Tado, when I came home from work I dcould flcik one switch and the heating would come on, the whole house yes, but just one switch. If I clicked twice, it stayed on two hours, three clicks, three. With Tado, I must take out my phone, find the app, and manually switch on four or five tabs, one after the other.. I coud set schedules, but I dont work to schedules.

I understand that to automate, even sonething simple, I must pay extra. NO where did the pulicity say that the system was half baked, unless I paid a subscription. I have to use my iphone at least three times a day to do somethin that should be automatic.Switch am I home or away, put on the heating, switch to I am home.

I cannot recomend this nonsense to anyone realisticly, and as a designer I think the design of the App, and the whole ethos of the business is just poor. I had a button. It switched on the heat. Now I have step after step, before I can get to the same point. I suspect I will not buy firther thermopstats ( overpriced anyway) and reveert to my manual system.

Thoughts anyone

sandromagni

I understand your concern, but mainly if you do not like automatic scheduling (that is the best thig tado can do) i do no t understand the reason why you installed Tado system. Also for someone choosing Tado, having to do with smatphone instead of manal switch and registration should be welcome.

Tado is not perfect but the points you mention are common with every smart system.

I dare suggest to have time to become familiar with automation and advantages that can bring.

Maybe you will have a different point of view.

Regards Sandro Magni

Vertigo

You are completely correct that the way tado is trying to force us in to buying a subscription is unacceptable. If that is reason enough for you to ditch the platform, I wont stop you. Whats worse is that even if you pay, their geofencing solution still is no good, as the home/away status is hard locked to the cell phone location, you still dont get an override for home/away, and that just doesnt work when you have other people coming over, when you forget your phone, when your battery is dead etc etc. I dont know who came up with this simpleton solution and thought it was a good idea to remove manual control over home/away status, but he or she should be fired.

Still, if you want to carry on with tado, there are ways to ease your pain. Simplest would be IFTTT. Install the app. You can use it to create 2 applets that link a button press with tado ; one which sets all temperatures to 15C (or whatever you want) and one that sets everything to automatic schedule again.

Im not familiar with iphones, but on android you can then create a widget on your homescreen to activate the thing. You can probably link it to siri too or even have a hardware wifi button at home, or RFID tags that you can tap with your phone to trigger it.

Rosko89

1000% agree

Im a fan of automation but I’m also a fan of user in control and I just cannot believe a system like this does not have an incredibly system built in button to set..

- I’m home
- I’m away
- global turn on all
- global turn on off
- global boast

Those things to me are the absolute basic ingredients to a heating system for me. You know the things I can easily do before I had TaDo last week.

Now this week those absolute basic features are gone and replaced with huge complexity.

Sure the complexity of automation etc is great but it should compliment the absolute basics - not replace it entirely.

I believe from what I’m told I could do these things with third party methods but that’s beside the point - I shouldn’t need to. It should be as simple as clicking a button.

Dem

You are absolutely right. Subscription service for the very think this whole system is about. Even when you do pay the subscription (me being stupid) it is still not working correctly all the times ( slow Tado cloud servers - my best guess). So, yes, after I spent all this cash I realised it was actually wasted. Had a Nest Thermostat for 3 years before that and was quite happy with it.

gary333

Apple Homekit can get around specific problem you are asking for help with. You can tell Siri to turn the whole house to x degrees. It'll stay at this level until the next schedule, set hours/minutes, or indefinitely depending on how you have set the time lag in the Tado app up.

The negative is that going back to automatic schedule cannot be done via Siri as an action as it takes manual control like you've been around each TRV and made the change yourself.