Launch a range extender or upgrade to mesh network
Comments
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At the very least, I would like to see some documentation from Tado on the question of positioning the internet bridge or bridges. I've got two, having purchased a Wireless thermostat starter kit and a radiator starter kit. But I have no idea if I can connect both of them or not. The troubleshooting guide says that the internet bridge needs to be 3 m from all devices, and not close to the internet router. But there must be more to say. Not providing clear information is one reason why I've been having serious problems since starting, with devices disconnecting at random moments.
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Just adding an up-vote for this.
I have a Tado system that generally works well. The biggest issue is I can not get all of the thermostats to connect all the time. We live in a very long thin 400yr old building with very thick stone walls. No matter where I put the central hub, it can not reliably connect to all the thermostats. I have it's position down to the 1cm where it will connect with one side and not the other side of the house. Move it 1cm and it connects to the other side and not the first.
Even worse than not reliably connecting - sometimes the thermostats stay stuck on when they loose the connection.
Come on. Please just enable either multiple hubs or have some form of repeater. It would solve so many users frustrations (I for one have spent hours/days messing with the precise location of my hub). It should not be this hard!
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This has to be addressed. I have a 2 story 100 m2 on each floor house, with 9 thermostats currently and I cannot find a a spot for the bridge where everything is consistently connected.
One thing is the annoyance for me, but try getting your spouse to use a system that works only half the time!
I have started not recommending this system if you live in anything larger than a 3 room flat, as these cutouts can leave the room cold in the day or warm in the night, which makes them even worse that a scheduled, unintelligent thermostat.
It has a great potential and with the home assistant integrations you can do some really nice things based on windows, people location and the weather, but the dropouts completely defeats all purposes for getting these.
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ADMIN EDIT: these kind of responses do not contribute to a healthy conversation. Even though this might have fixed your specific situation, we also have cases where your proposed solution did not have any impact.
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To everyone that experiences this issue, could you try to do the following:
- Moving the bridge is the most effictive fix for radio stability issues. Not only moving, but even a different orientation (horizontal, vertical, diagonal, upside down) could have a positive impact.
- Try to temporarily change to a different 5V usb power supply. (try a phone charger power supply). Please report back if this has a positive impact on the issue or no impact at all.
- Try a different Micro USB cable (very low likelyhood of having an impact but please test this). Please also report back if this has any impact.
- If you have a differnet LAN cable, why not try to swap that aswell.
Please note: We are also conducting an internal investigation in paralel, but getting some feedback from the community could help us point that investigation into the right direction sooner
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@Jurian moving the bridge to high in the roof mounted vertically with the cable at the top resolved all issues for me - we are in a house with thick stone internal walls, so the bridge is looking down on all the rooms mainly going through floors and ceilings, not walls. Previous positions around the house resulted in many random disconnects.
2,3&4 made no difference.2 -
Thanks for the post. After another morning of the wife complaining (quite rightly!) of a freezing cold kitchen, sub 10c when the TRVs fail to kick in due to connectivity to the internet bridge) she wanted the whole system ripped out.
I decided to make one last check on here to see if there had been any updates .... Like @johnbur I have an old, thick stone wall house, so had moved my internet bridge upstairs pretty quickly after moving in, but per recommendations always mounted it vertically. The two TRV's in our kitchen were always disconnecting, even though one in another room further away (and through another thick stone wall) was working fine.
Your point #1 got me thinking. I expect the vertical recommendation on tado website is making the assumption that the internet bridge is on the ground floor and will send the signal upwards to the floors above.
I adjusted mine a couple of hours ago to be "upside" down and, whilst early to be 100% confident the results are promising. Both previously intermittent TRV's have stayed connected, and now even respond to the "Hi" request, which never seemed to work before.
Tomorrow morning will be a good test to see if our kitchen heats up per the schedule 😀
Now if I can just get one of them to upgrade from 75.2 firmware to 79.1 then I'll be very happy (without having to move it to another radiator to work).
Finally, this thread has got me thinking, we know that the "Connected" is not always a true representation of status, I recall reading somewhere that the TRV's "check-in" every 20 minutes? How about under the "Connected" add a signal strength to show the connection back to the internet bridge. This would, I'm sure be helpful to those trying to diagnose intermittent and tricky connectivity issues in older / larger houses. It could be as a % or even like a wifi/mobile strength signal indication on a mobile phone? (personally I would prefer to see a %).
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@johnbur Great update! Very positive. This helps us to gather insights.
@paul0000 Great positive update. And thanks for the suggestion at the bottom, this will also be considered. However, we first want to improve stability. Ideally our products radio connection should be so stable that there won't be a need for a signal quality symbol in the app.
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@Jurian You're welcome.
To confirm after a couple of days, things are much better with my two troublesome TRV's. Our kitchen has now been heating as it should with the internet bridge upstairs, and mounted upside down. The problem has shifted to a room at the other end of the house, but it's not often used and I think if I play around with the bridge location by a few feet it'll resolve it.
I didn't try 2, 3 or 4 in your note above. I work in IT (and whilst I could be wrong 😉 ) - I can't see that any of those suggestions with cables and PSU's could cause the symptoms experienced by others in this thread.
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@paul0000 : just a little comment on you last section mentioning that you couldn't see how cables would impact.
As you and I both know (since we both work in the IT business) LAN cables can always impact network stability, but indeed as you probably meant, this has little to no relation with wireless dropouts of individual TRV's.
However for the PSU part, I have actually had some experience with a few devices that had a faulty PSU (not able to provide the required amount of power). These devices (one in particular) had a PSU that was just on the edge of the requirements (even though it was provided with the device it self) and when the device draw a little bit more juice from the PSU then expected, the voltage drop of the PSU caused very weird behavior. The device did not reset/rebooted it self, neither did it stop working (which made it very difficult to debug), but some processes ended up working a little bit slower as well as some wireless power output dropped a bit (which defines wireless range). In the end replacing the PSU with a version that has a little bit more juice solved the problems.
So, also for everyone else reading this, although highly unlikely, it is not uncommon for a PSU to go faulty and cause problems difficult to identify.
The best option if you do want to test with another PSU, is to use one that has significantly more power (e.g. use a 2A or 3A USB PSU), preferably also with a good quality cable of course ;) and see if that helps. If not, then it is likely the original PSU is just fine.
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I had an issue with one of my smart radiator thermostats having intermittent connection issues. It was situated on the same floor as the bridge, but right at the opposite end of the house - approximately 13 metres away, and through a reasonably thick wall.
Curiously it only ever suffered connectivity issues at night. I wondered if there was something in the house that was causing some interference, and the only thing I could think of was the baby monitor which was typically off during the day and on at night. I never managed to conclusively prove this as the cause though.
The fix for me was to use a very long USB and Ethernet cable and position the bridge lying horizontally on top of a wardrobe, pointing in the direction of the problematic radiator thermostat. It was therefore still in the same room it originally was, but moved much higher up which moved it well away from the router and other electronic gadgets etc that were also plugged into the router. This resolved the problem completely.
It was probably just the repositioning that fixed it - the changing of cables was just a necessity to get it into that position, but thought I'd explicitly mention the changing of cables, and orientation (horizontal - as opposed to vertical, which is most often advised) in case it does prove useful to somebody.0 -
@Spikey Fair comments. I think you're probably right about the PSU/USB connection. I have mine powered by a USB hub, but I guess this is always a chance of voltage drop which could cause intermittent issues. Similar with the network cable. My comments were more focused on my individual issues (and note meant to be dismissive 😊) - so thanks for posting the above for others to consider.
@cbd20 Interesting you note about the evening drop outs. Most of ours were also occurring into the evening and overnight. During the day for the most part, connectivity whenever I checked the app, was fine. I can't think of anything in our household that comes on in the evening, apart from lighting / TV's that could cause interference. We don't have any near by neighbours that could cause wifi or other wireless interference.
@Jurian not sure if this should be pointed to support, but it's related to this thread so I wanted to add my experience. I spent a little more time today moving the Internet bridge around (within a 15cm area) to try and catch the other room that was dropping out. It'd been ok for a few hours today, but has since dropped out again (2 x TRV in room, one not responding, the other is fine) this evening.
Anyway, I noticed there are a few ways to check TRV connectivity; 1) the main "Home" page, 2) Settings>Home>Rooms and Devices 3) Settings>Homekit and 4) iOS Homekit app directly
I'm getting some varied status indications (I've waited a few hours to see if anything changes) from a couple of rooms.
I see:
- connected in the main "Home" page
- connected in Rooms and Devices
- "no response" in settings>homekit
- "no response" in iOS home app for the TRV
With our Kitchen TRV issues previously, I would see all ok in the Tado main home page, but one of the TRV would be no response in "rooms and devices", and either none or only one of the radiators would be heating.
Is there a sync delay between the different status pages? .... makes home troubleshooting a little harder.
Thanks,
Paul
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@Jurian It seems I was a little quick on success .... I cannot get all TRVs to reliably stay connected. I've tried a few more locations (leaving for a few hours each time) and am still getting dropouts from devices at either end of the house.
For example we have two TRV's in our kitchen. They were due to turn off at 20:30 this evening. One is off, the other (erroring with "No Remote Access") was still hot, meaning it's still calling for heat and hadn't received the command to shut down. I had to manually turn it off. I am guessing in the morning it'll still be off as it likely won't receive the signal to open up. If I move the internet bridge over a couple of cm the issue switches from one radiator TRV to the other.
I don't understand why I see no errors in the app for hours at a time, and then intermittently devices error out for an undetermined amount of time, and then seem to start working again.
I'll continue to adjust the location and see if I can find the sweet spot, but I'm starting to think a reliable connection to the TRV's just can't be maintained (if it helps, I can send you a floor plan to help visualise where the TRV issues are in relation to the internet bridge location).
Thanks!
Paul
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@paul0000 but you shouldn't have to do this - if you had to move your TV around the room to get the all of the picture on all of the screen you would take it back. Tado need to make a range extender to service the people with older with thick walls or houses with larger floor plans. This product is not fit for purpose because of limitations in the product that the vendor is aware of and continues to sell their product knowing that customers may struggle to get it fully working.
I believe that if you have bought your system in good faith after this thread was started you have a good case to get a full refund from Tado and I think they should add details on their product literature and website about the known limitations. To continue as they are is, frankly dishonest. Would you have bought the product and invested both the time and money if you knew there was a good chance it would not operate as advertised or as you had hoped?
Steve
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@stevearmstrong Don’t forget to test every permutation with no scientific measurement capability!
I’d rather buy a lottery ticket than help fix tado’s product. I sadly gave up trying to resolve my connection issues. If you saw the conditions I have it installed in, you will come to understand that bricks and walls are the least of tado’s range problems.
I always said tado might have been able to resolve this by providing external SMA connectors on their Bridge, to allow for an external antenna. We could have probably easily resolved this after-market with our own antennas, but tado went for form-over-function, and so here we are. Anybody who lives in a normal house anywhere in the world, will never be able to use tado properly.
I’m off to go buy me that lottery ticket.1 -
I wrote a big long reply yesterday but it got flagged for approval for some reason.
Anyway, I agree with you @stevearmstrong and @beeftrader we shouldn't be having these issues with a premium product. I must admit I do like the tado solution and apart from the range issues I think it fits my needs well, I have 17 Tado devices in my house which is a significant investment, however the range issues are a serious shortfall. I returned a bunch more TRV's after finding out exactly how the 10 room limit works.
After another 30 minutes yesterday adjusting (by cm's) the internet bridge. I am in a better position but still see TRV's dropping off intermittently.
I think a mesh system or additional internet bridge(s) are the only way to solve this, but I suspect Tado design is not easily going to enable this without a new product line.
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My reading of these forums: if Tado doesn't respond, then it probably isn't going to happen. Also, the answer at Tado is never "read the manual" because they never bothered to write one.
The good news: it looks like this thread provides the answer to one of my questions, namely does every device have to attach directly to the bridge?
The bad news (for Tado): it appears that the answer is still "yes" which means that I will not be buying.
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@gazzrennI like your style with the poe. I'm just about ready to get the electrician in to take out the boiler control and replace it with a normal one and put my old trvs back on (I didn't get rid of them when I installed the tado and I'm glad I didn't).
Except I feel bad about selling all the bits to some poor unsuspecting mug.
If you've still got enough strength of will, I've thought of one last thing to try. The best place I found was on the top floor and I have it resting on its side. I found that improved connectivity for all but the one that is most problematic, I saw a comment here from someone who has it in the loft (I think) with foil above it to direct the signal down into the house. Perhaps you might be able to take those ideas and see if you can hack a fix?
What I've never quite understood is that the boiler control never loses connectivity, despite being the furthest away - nor does the room thermostats, it's just the trvs... but hey ho, eh?
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@Elisabeth As a last ditch attempt I tried the foil .. no luck. Our internet bridge isn't quite in the loft, but the airing cupboard upstairs which is pretty much central to the whole house.
Like you, I have TRV's further away that work, but the two (for our Kitchen) constantly lose connectivity. In fact, after working for a few days, they have again randomly dropped and we've nearly a week with no connection (AND NO HEATING!) in the room in the morning.
Nothing changed, nothing moved.
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same with my problem one. My guess is for the first few days the batteries are strong enough and then as they lose power they try more frequently to connect and it drains them within a few weeks.
Mine's in my cellar and I have it come on to keep the cold/condensation at bay - so I'm less than impressed.
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I just added a second internet bridge so that I have 9 rooms with one internet bridge, and 4 others (out of range) with a second one. It means having separate accounts for the two parts of the house, which is pretty dumb. But I've got one set up on my iPhone, the other on my iPad. I'll have to keep doing that until Tado allows me to add both bridges to the same home. Surely not that difficult....
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I am confused, I thought that the Tado TRVs actually create a mesh zigbee network. In my home, all off them are able to talk to internet bridge over 3 floors. Am I missing something?
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@paul0000 : just a little comment on you last section mentioning that you couldn't see how cables would impact.
As you and I both know (since we both work in the IT business) LAN cables can always impact network stability, but indeed as you probably meant, this has little to no relation with wireless dropouts of individual TRV's.
However for the PSU part, I have actually had some experience with a few devices that had a faulty PSU (not able to provide the required amount of power). These devices (one in particular) had a PSU that was just on the edge of the requirements (even though it was provided with the device it self) and when the device draw a little bit more juice from the PSU then expected, the voltage drop of the PSU caused very weird behavior. The device did not reset/rebooted it self, neither did it stop working (which made it very difficult to debug), but some processes ended up working a little bit slower as well as some wireless power output dropped a bit (which defines wireless range). In the end replacing the PSU with a version that has a little bit more juice solved the problems.
So, also for everyone else reading this, although highly unlikely, it is not uncommon for a PSU to go faulty and cause problems difficult to identify.
The best option if you do want to test with another PSU, is to use one that has significantly more power (e.g. use a 2A or 3A USB PSU), preferably also with a good quality cable of course ;) and see if that helps. If not, then it is likely the original PSU is just fine.
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@stevearmstrong You're right. It is frustrating and I can see a lot of others are suffering from connectivity issues, so this isn't an "isolated" problem. I spent another 30 minutes moving my bridge around after a full day of two rooms being unreachable.
Right now, they all appear connected, but when I check the HomeKit section I see one TRV has already dropped off so just a matter of time before it stops showing as connected on the main homepage.
I am pretty pleased with the overall functionality of Tado, but the constant connectivity issues leave a big black cloud over this and I expect it's only matter of time before the wife has one too many cold mornings in the kitchen and I'll be searching for a replacement solution.
I hope Tado is listening and looking into a viable solution .. it would be good to get a better understanding of what and when. I'm sure many here would be willing to test or help if it benefits them.
@beeftrader get me one as well :)
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Hello all.
I have a 3 floor house and even If i placed the internet bridge the best way possible (following the best practice provided by tado), I have a couple of Smart Radiator Thermostat loosing the connection to the bridge.
Could you please provide an internet bridge "extender - signal repeater" to solve this kind of problem?
A disconnected device is pretty useless....
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Hi @Markisha1979 , you may want to add your voice to this existing suggestion.
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Our house is long and narrow, with old solid stone walls, and a single Tado internet bridge simply does not have the range to reach Smart thermostats in all the rooms we would like to install them into.
The current system has no way to extend the range of the internet bridge, or to add a second receiver into the same account / tado system. With home sizes increasing, and the real value of tado for me being granular control of multiple zones in large houses, I think this improvement makes a lot of sense.
Happy to be a alpha / beta tester for any solutions for this!
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Only saw this thread after creating a new suggestion saying exactly the same thing! Just adding my voice to the many others to say that this is a desperately needed feature! Similar story to many others - old long house with stone walls, meaning that wherever we place the internet bridge there are rooms at one end of the house that are outside of the range to connect.
I like so many other aspects of tado - it's such a shame that this really cripples the benefit for larger houses!
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Such a shame there are gaps in the tado platform. Lack of a range extender is one. Recently we had to swap from the old boiler extension kit to the new on and suddenly we're limited to 10 zones. Honestly, that's shoddy customer experience. Looking around...
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