Should I buy a Tado system?
Hi
I am thinking of getting a smart heating system.
I have a quite a large house and three teenage children.
The children are all coming and going at different times.
My eldest child has a bedroom on the front of the house which has a bay window. The wall is very thin in the bay, and the window consists of 14 double glazed units in aluminium frames. Her room and the "TV room" below it are noticeably colder than the rest of the house.
My other daughter also complains that her room is cold and that the radiator "doesn't work", but of course it does but only when the thermostat in the hall gets cold enough to put the heating on.
I did try to put a second wireless thermostat in the front bedroom (with the bay window) so that if it got really cold in there it would override the one in the hall and put the heating on, but this makes the rest of the house too hot.
The boiler is a modern condensing combi boiler.
Downstairs there are four radiators, on in each room, one in the hallway, a small one in the kitchen and a fan based heat exchanger under a kitchen unit that blows into the dining room.
Upstairs there are three rooms each with a radiator and a towel rail in the bathroom.
In the loft there are two radiators in my office that turned off and two in another bedroom. This bedroom is quite warm as it seems well insulated and we like it quite cool to just sleep in there anyway.
All of the radiators have thermostatic valves with only the towel rail being unregulated (you have to have one unregulated so at to not overload the pump in the boiler).
Ideally I would want to be able to turn on heat in individual rooms, probably the two girls rooms and maybe the downstairs cold TV room. Another option might be that the girls rooms only cause the boiler to come on for their rooms when they are actually in the house. I don't see the point of pouring heat through the bay window upstairs when no one is in the room but equally I don't want my daughter to feel so cold; she seems to suffer mostly at night.
Everyone in the house has an Android phone with a data plan.
I can see how a Tado system might know whether people are in the house or not, but I don't see how it would know what room they are in, maybe that's too much to ask.
I guess if each child can control the temperature of their room (within limits) but only if they are actually in the house then that would be pretty good.
Would Tado work in my scenario and what would I need to buy? or should I get something else?
Installation is not a problem. I am an engineer and installed most of the heating system originally myself anyway.
thanks
Answers
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I forgot to say. Currently there is a seven day electronic thermostat in hall and it is basically set to 21 deg C mornings and evenings. 20 deg C in the middle of the day (which is a little cold) and 18 at night.
When I put a thermostat in my daughter cold room even set at 16 degree at night it made the rest of the house too warm to sleep properly. That's what I meant by "too hot"
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@dieselnutjob Hello. Not sure from your post how many rooms/devices you have but note the following:
The maximum number of devices is limited by the maximum number of configurable rooms:
- Accounts with rooms controlled independently from one another can have up to 25 rooms.
- Accounts with rooms with a central tado° boiler controller can have up to 10 rooms
Tado works in a similar way to any other competitor in this field but they all have slight differences. You are correct in saying that Home or Away cannot be tailored to ID each room and its occupant. Away means ALL away and to do what you ask concerning the 'girls only being away' would require you to have 2 accounts.
It would be wrong of me to advocate tado but suggest you have a glance at the threads on this site which will give you an overview of issues awaiting re-design. To be fair, most systems I have looked at have deficiencies in some area or other.
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okay the all away vs one away is one thing.
the other issue is wildly different levels of insulation in different rooms
conventional wisdom seems to be that a radiator stat on every radiator should solve this but in practice it doesn't solve the entire system turning off because the hallway is warm when one room is still cold. The solution to that would be to put the thermostat in the coldest room but and leave the radiator stats to control the warmer rooms but a radiator stat doesn't know the difference between night and day.
could Tado or some other system help with that?
The problem is that to put a Tado smart rad stat of every radiator in this house will cost an absolute fortune
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also, does a Tado radiator stat allow me to set that particular room (or the whole house) to 21 during the day and 18 at night?
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@dieselnutjob You said:
conventional wisdom seems to be that a radiator stat on every radiator should solve this but in practice it doesn't solve the entire system turning off because the hallway is warm when one room is still cold. It does solve it because every radstat has the same primacy as the tado Boiler-controlling thermostat which could even be set to Frost Protection and the rads could still access heat. The solution to that would be to put the thermostat in the coldest room but and leave the radiator stats to control the warmer rooms but a radiator stat doesn't know the difference between night and day.
You can set the schedule to cover multiple changes of target heat throughout any of the 7 x 24 hour periods.
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every radstat has the same primacy as the tado Boiler-controlling thermostat which could even be set to Frost Protection and the rads could still access heat
Can each child have their own account linked to the one radstat in their own room?
if one child is home then their radstat demands heat and heats up their room? and the radstats in the other rooms stay closed and those rooms don't heat up?
How does one define "shared" areas? Can you have a radstat in say a living room that is linked to all of the accounts so that if any one of them is home then the shared area is heated?
or I suppose I could leave conventional thermostats in the shared area so that when a child comes home that causes the their radstat to demand heat and the shared area gets the heat anyway?
could I have four different accounts for four different radstats in four different rooms but all of them going through the same internet box and boiler control box?
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@dieselnutjob You said:
Can each child have their own account linked to the one radstat in their own room? Yes but it would cost a small fortune.
if one child is home then their radstat demands heat and heats up their room? and the radstats in the other rooms stay closed and those rooms don't heat up? Yes
How does one define "shared" areas? Can you have a radstat in say a living room that is linked to all of the accounts so that if any one of them is home then the shared area is heated?
or I suppose I could leave conventional thermostats in the shared area so that when a child comes home that causes the their radstat to demand heat and the shared area gets the heat anyway? Yes
could I have four different accounts for four different radstats in four different rooms but all of them going through the same internet box and boiler control box? A separate account consists of a full new set up bundle for each person! i.e bridge, boiler control stat etc.
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So you can have one account with one bridge and multiple phones, but if any one of those phones is in the house, it heats up the entire house? This seems rather stupid. Surely a specific phone in the account could be linked to a specific radstat in the house! That's how modern families with teenagers live (rightly or wrongly).
Have I understood this correctly?
Is there another system from another company that will allow a teenagers phone to allow a Radstat in their room to demand heat and have other bedrooms not heat up?
It seems like are very simple way to save energy.
Tado are you listening?0 -
@dieselnutjob Hi again - Yes you have understood it correctly. At the moment, the tado system requires you to 'teach' your offspring' to remember to turn off their bedrooms on vacating!! There is a thread supporting the change you mention.
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Thank you samd. You have been very helpful.
My offspring are unteachable.
"There is a thread supporting the change you mention"
do you mean this one
https://community.tado.com/en-gb/discussion/3462
or this one
https://community.tado.com/en-gb/discussion/3358
or this one
https://community.tado.com/en-gb/discussion/3097
or this one
https://community.tado.com/en-gb/discussion/3051
or this one
https://community.tado.com/en-gb/discussion/2936
?
It seems like five requests all basically for the same thing.
Dear Tado, I am going for a product that does this per room thing if I can find one (not necessarily from you). This is what I really want a smart heating system for. If I find a product that does it, then I will buy it. If such a product doesn't exist then I will stick with what I have until someone does it.
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dieselnutjob you might look at Honeywell's Evohome (after sorting out the radiator balancing and any under-powered emitters mentioned by others above). Tado's lights may be on, but there's no evidence of anyone being at home.
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