Extremely flakey connection to the wireless receiver
Has anyone else had issues with the wireless receiver constantly dropping connection unless the bridge is very very close?
We moved house recently, old house had wired thermostat so we were using the old wired thermostat to communicate/control the boiler. Our new house has the boiler in the loft so we bought the (relatively new) wireless receiver kit along with a few TRVs to cover the whole house (3 bed semi, nothing massive).
I initially set up the bridge on the landing so it was pretty central and have all the TRVs within range (Tado told me the range is 3-13m). Unfortunately the wireless receiver (~7m away) kept losing the connection resulting in the heating staying on well beyond it being needed or worse turning on randomly at night. Moving the bridge into a bedroom directly under the the boiler in the loft (4m vertical distance) gives a stable connection to the wireless receiver.
However, this now means that the wireless thermostat in the lounge (~13m) and the TRV in a front bedroom (~12m) frequently lose connection. This now seems to result in the wireless receiver turning the boiler on in the middle of the night. This happens even though all the TRVs/thermostats are not calling for heat, or are disconnected (and were not calling for heat when disconnected). This behaviour seems at odds with what is documented by tado themselves; when disconnected the same behaviour should continue until reconnected, so in this instance I would expect the boiler not to fire up since it wasn't firing when the connection was lost.
I've contacted Tado via their support channels but they just say it's due to a "connectivity issue" in my house. My house doesn't have thick walls and is a standard construction. They asked about mobile signal and I said we have poor mobile signal, which I think they've confused themselves with. We live in the countryside and the mobile signal is the same inside and outside! We've got a phillips hue system set up and that works flawlessly despite the bridge being at the opposite end of the house to the bulbs.
Has anyone else had similar issues, specifically involving the wireless receiver?
Answers
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Hi,
I’m the same boat and there are lots of other threads on this forums with others experiencing the same issues. I saw one comments about setting the Bridge upside down with power cord extended upwards that acts as an aerial for the signal (Tado say it should be upright) so I’m going to try that this evening. Anything that might work, works for me
i have, BTW, lots of email exchanges with Tado support as we tried various setup - I’ve even swapped Smart TRVs to other locations to rule out any device faults and have recently installed a TP Deco mesh WiFi that seemed to settle everything down for a week or so, before drop outs happened again.
Seems like it will take some cleaver thinking by Tado to allow for multiple Bridges, or something else to ensure widest range is provided for.
cheers,
SeanG
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Yeah we've done pretty much the same thing (even down to the Deco mesh)! I've just about convinced support that there's something abnormal about our configuration that means the wireless receiver is just not great at receiving... It was OK for the first month but then something (and I cannot work out what) changed to make it unreliable.
Multiple bridges, some sort of mesh capability, all of those sound ideal but I've not got high hopes for a speedy resolution in that regard.
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I'm intrigued that you say that "Tado told me the range is 3-13m". Where does it say this in the documentation or installation instructions. I'm trying to install the system in a house where the total distances can be up to 30 m, and where there are some very thick internal stone walls (60 cm) which I presume will seriously reduce the range. But to what? 6 m?? What are you supposed to do at longer ranges? Add additional internet bridges? It turns out that I actually have two anyway (having bought two starter kits), but I can't find any information about how to use them.
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That figure was quoted to me in an email with tech support. Sadly you can't use multiple bridges (I also have two for similar reasons) to boost the range. There are plenty of forum threads asking about it as a feature too, worth a read and add a comment to keep tado support reminded that people want this sort of feature.
For completeness, the "resolution" to my problem is that the wireless receiver is too close to the boiler. This apparently causes interference and really reduces the range of the receiver itself and possibly the bridge. Unfortunately I am not able to lengthen the wire between the boiler and receiver to move it so I have had to remove my furthest TRVs to get a sufficiently stable connection to the erroneous heating for now. When we get our boiler serviced I shall ask the technician to move the receiver for me and hopefully this will enable us to use the system more fully.
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Hi,
According to https://support.tado.com/en/articles/3557440-how-does-the-tado-internet-bridge-communicate-with-other-tado-devices#:~:text=The%20tado%C2%B0%20devices%20communicate,inside%20buildings%20and%20through%20walls. Tado is using 868 MHz frequency. This frequency is now more an more popular at wireless devices due to low power consumption. I have burglar alarm with some home automation. I experienced similar issues and all was caused by Tado, alarm etc. interfering together. In my case I was able to set on the alarm to automatically find lowest occupied channel which has resolved issues with Tado. Maybe in your case you could try to disable all your devices which could interfere with Tado and see if this helps.
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Thanks @arturr1987. I think that tado looked at the channel on the wireless receiver. I'll take a look and see whether anything else in our house is on that network band though.
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I have an issue too. The burglar alarm might be an issue, or the receiver proximity to the boiler...not sure, but I think Tado should work at this as a priority. 13M is simply not far enough...0
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I have the same or similar issue. My bridge is behind the painting, connected with tado’s provided usb and internet cables, which are super short. It’s about 7m away from the receiver, which is probably too close to the boiler as well and on top of that behind the closed doors. If this connection would be actually wifi and not IR, there wouldn’t be any issues like this.
Receiver too close to the boiler shouldn’t be an issue. I just placed it where previous one was.
Another big issue for me is the fact that the app shows all working fine, when in fact it’s all wrong and disconnected. I manually unplugged the devices from electricity and the app doesn’t recognise it. It keeps showing connected.
Tado is rather Tardo at this point…
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Another thing to check is that a lot of areas in newer houses where a boiler and extension kit are fitted, kitchen or cupboard, have foil back plasterboard. I assume this is some building regulation now. But anyhow they act as a faraday cage. I noticed it at a friends house, go into their kitchen on a mobile phone call and the signal drops.
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I have had an update from tado. they have acknowledged that their hardware is at its limits for signal strength.
"at the maximum signal strength that is possible with the current hardware"
so if we have items like I mentioned, or thick walls, or more than two floors, then you are screwed, but that is not documented on their site.
You cant have two bridges in place, they dont use mesh technology (admitted to me last year by them), so basically have you bridge right next to the extension kit, but then the other devices cannot get a strong enough signal.
Oh and the app and website dont update in real time if the bridge is offline
This comment gets me:-
"Moving furniture, a neighbour installing a new device all can have a major impact."
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I spent a morning recabling my wireless receiver so it could be moved from the kitchen (where there was a brick wall between it and the bridge) to under the stairs in the hall where there is only the woodwork of the staircase in-between, and the bridge is just about 2m distant.
Stability has improved but even so there have been, perhaps, 3 dropouts over the last week. I can't improve the positioning any more.
It surprises me that it is the, mains powered, wireless receiver which seems the most likely bit of kit to drop out. The TRVs are situated much more distantly around the house and there are masonry walls in-between them and the bridge, but only one TRV has an occasional drop out.
One does wonder what tado was thinking when planning the product, there were already other smart heating controls, Honeywell for example, which featured repeaters.
It's extremely disappointing that tado does not come up with the goods in this regard, particularly as rival systems, such as Wiser, are now the more affordable product . . .
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if you have any firewall restrictions on your router, make sure that your tado bridge has unresticted access to ingress.tado.com or the following IP addresses (this is probably just for the EU)
52.211.81.71
46.51.149.197
52.48.29.221
52.208.191.132
for reference all located in Amazon AWS
It looks like the bridge connects from port 10001 to port 443. if looks like port 10001 is hardcoded, so if another service, laptop, pc tries to use the same port, then both will get disconnected, until the connecion timesout, which could explain quite a lot with the connection instability with tado.
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Connection is not IR. It's 868MHz radio using 6LoWPAN protocol. This is the same as other home automation products
Reason for this over WiFi is that WiFi is too power hungry and much more expensive to implement. Your radiator valve AA batteries wouldn't last a day on WiFi! Also, the lower frequency should be much less affected by walls etc in the same way that 2.4GHz WiFi goes further than 5GHz WiFi
Hopefully Tado will implement mesh networking (already supported by 6LoWPAN) in their next hardware release. I guess they're keeping tight-lipped as to when that will come out as they don't want harm sales of their current product range
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There are a few issues with 6LoWPAN in mesh mode, the main one is it uses more power. It is also a bit slower on getting data from A to B, but that shouldnt be an issue in this scenario as the data packet size will be tiny and specific. And then there is a trade off, do I save battery and put the leafs into longer sleep mode and restrict the requirement I have for meshing. Meshing is great, but has big trade-offs.
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Very true but potentially it could also save power if a device only has to communicate to its nearest neighbour rather than the bridge as it does appear that distance, walls etc play a part in battery life
When I bought my Tado stuff, mesh was actually mentioned somewhere in the specs online.
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In my house, which is an older detached property with some thick walls but nothing huge the Tado system is totally unreliable because of the bridge. It is impossible to get all devices connected. As soon as I move the bridge to solve one connection, another is lost. I save no money on heating as various parts of the system disconnect randomly and pump out heat when not required.
The same problem occurred in the early days with the SONOS music system when it had a bridge. Fortunately their engineers listened to their customers and solved the issue so the bridge was made redundant and the system then operated flawlessly within one's existing wi-fi mesh.
It's ridiculous that TADO refuse to solve this serious flaw in their system. Isn't German engineering supposed to be reliable?
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Interesting comparison @Mike_Brewer_1 . I also have Sonos and actually had issues with connections on one of the devices when I put it on my own WiFi. I reverted back to their Bridge but when the updated to S2 and the bridge was not supported, I hard wired my Playbar so I could continue using their mesh
Unfortunately, Tado is restricted by the standards of 6LoWPAN. I can only assume that battery life was terrible when they tried mesh. In reality, I don't think the devices need to respond as quickly as they do. If they only checked in every 30-60 seconds then that would be enough and perhaps might help with power consumption but it might not be possible to do that unless they went with a completely proprietary set up
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