Total Boiler On Time
After just migrating from Nest to Tado I'm trying to compare how long my Combi boiler has been on during the day. Nest helpfully showed the total heat time during the day but i've been unable to find the same for Tado within the app. Is it possible?
Answers
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I would like to see this as well. Former nest user. This is a necessity for me.
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Tado can give a report of "heating time", day by day, but I'm not sure of the value of the numbers. Specifically, Tado might know how many hours/minutes it has been requesting heat, but the boiler won't necessarily have been burning gas/oil for that many hours. The boiler will run until it reaches set temperature, but will then modulate down, if it can, to maintain that temperature. If it cannot modulate down low enough it will turn off the gas, let the pump run for a few more minutes and then enter anti-cycling mode for several more minutes to avoid frequent restarts.
Taking my own property as an example, here is the "heating report" for yesterday from Tado....
And here is a breakdown of actual gas utilisation from my smart meter in half hour chunks....
So in a sense you might argue that the boiler was on practically all day, but it really wasn't. Its minimum output is 9kW and the total burn for the day was 65kW gas. Well 65 / 9 = 7.2 hours of actual burn time in that 24 hour period.
So, what do you really want to know? Is it useful to know the boiler running time or heating time? Personally I don't think so. I find it of more interest to know my total burn and when the burn occurred. I certainly don't find value in Tado's numbers. It's not that they're "wrong", but I just don't think that they mean much.
Oh, and if your boiler is modulating up and down then is an hour at 9kW or 2kW output the same as an hour at 24kW output? I'd argue not, which again calls into question the value of counting heating hours. I'd rather count kWh.
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Tado provides this information under the 'Care & Protect' tile, which also shows which rooms have been calling for heat. You can click on each day for a more detailed breakdown
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This is not accurate, since TADO can also enable the pump only(1 wave can mean pump or pump+low heat demand). This results in inaccurate boiler activity time. I have no clue why tado didn't use 4 waves or 3 waves+ a pump icon :)
Example: during moderate cold my house remains on temperature with 1 wave for multiple hours. Checking the boiler only shows pump activity no heat activity this can make the stats wrong by multiple hours per day. I stopped using the feature cause it does not relate well enough to gas usage or boiler on time.
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According to Tado my heating was on for 23 hours yesterday. Well, it's never actually "off" since room thermostats can pick any time of day and night to request heat.
If you look at my gas consumption for that day, it is true that some gas was burned in every hour of the day, so in a sense it was "on" all day. But the reality is that most of the time the boiler was not lit. Typically it burns for 10 minutes and then chills for ten minutesor more, so in any average hour there is typically only 30 minutes of flame. Even then, it's heavily modulated down, so it's not a full burn rate.
At minimum the boiler outputs (consumes?) 9kW, so with a total consumption of 71.47kWh for the whole day the boiler was only lit for 71/9 = 8 hours burn time at most, even less if the flame was above minimum.
So what does that mean for Tado's figure of 23 hours? Not a lot, in my opinion. I have no idea how that number could be useful to anyone.
To call it "smoke and mirrors" seems quite generous to me. ;-)
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With the return of milder weather I've taken another look at Tado's reported "heating time" vs boiler burn time.
Right now it is 13:17. Tado says I've had 7 hours 31 minutes of heating time today. It also says I have two rooms heating, yet the boiler last fired up two hours ago. In fact, adding up all the periods of rising flow/return temperature so far today I make it about 80 minutes of burning gas.
Edit : 13:21 - Tado has just flicked the relay on and the boiler has now fired up for the first time in two hours.
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Further, since today's temperatures are similar to yesterday's, I thought I'd look back on the full gas consumption for that 24 hour period. Tado says over 17 hours of heating time.
Whilst my total gas consumption for the day of under 40kWh suggests the boiler was lit for no more than four hours, bearing in mind minimum output of 9kW, max of 24kW.
So which figure (if either) is actually useful and will inform decision making? My guess is that it certainly won't be the Tado number. I can't think of any value in that statistic.
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Stats are in for yesterday.
Tado says 14 hours heating time.
Ovo says less than 27kWh of gas consumed (including shower and gas hob cooking). That suggests less then 3 hours of boiler burn time, with large periods (a couple of hours at a time) of zero burn.
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Hi, I mentioned this as an improvement in app metrics to tado support as found I was heating a lot more than expected but request heat does not equal boiler time and was asked to vote it up in the forums. Makes sense to have heating request time from rads and sensors and boiler fired up time separate. Unsure how to vote up beyond commenting. Will like first post also.0
