Take control of your heating the smart way with tado
Tado V3+ smart home heating system.
With us all staying at home, heating has become more critical than ever. I use oil heating and have a simple heating system with an oil boiler and mostly older style radiators with no zoning like you’d find in modern homes. However, I’ve tested a few different smart heating solutions and am currently testing a few products from German company Tado.
I installed the Tado V3+ smart home thermostat, which gave me a lot of features including the ability to set schedules, turn on the heating with Alexa or look at the humidity in a room to see if it’s too high or even too low.
The Tado V3+ starter kit comes with a room thermostat with a minimalistic design that will look good anywhere. The display is off most of the time but can light up to show you room temperature and heating status. I use it wirelessly but it can be used wired to replace an existing thermostat. Depending on your heating setup, you may need an additional Tado device called an Extension Kit, which replaces an existing wireless thermostat receiver. I needed to install this in my house and installation was tricky but thanks to the excellent setup procedure and Tado support service I was able to manage this myself. If you’re not confident in doing jobs like this then definitely seek professional help before taking on a job that involves electricity.
The kit also comes with an internet bridge that connects directly to your broadband modem and allows the system to talk to each via your home network and over the internet. This means you can control your heating at home or abroad.
Tado also sent me two smart radiator thermostats to test and luckily, I had two rads with TRV vales that worked using the supplied adaptors. The installation is painless and doesn’t require draining the system because all you’re doing is replacing the valve head.
The smart valve heads have a small display that shows the set temperature and use a small AA battery to power the display and small motor which pushes the TRV up and down to change the flow of water into the radiator to control the heat. The motor noise is audible but I hardly ever noticed it. A new update now gives you the option of turning on a child lock to prevent little hands from turning on or off the heating.
The valve heads come in either vertical or horizontal models depending on your installation. The only difference is the orientation of the display.
Like the smart thermostat, you can manually control the radiator thermostat by twisting it clockwise or anticlockwise. They wireless connecting to the bridge, allowing full control using the app remotely.
The beauty of the radiator thermostat is it gives you full individual control over each room you install it in. If you only have the smart thermostat and that’s in say your living room which is set to 20c, other rooms may be either too cold or too warm because they’re at the mercy of the water flow and how well you’ve balanced them.
The smart thermostat has a basic display and touch controls that allow you to turn on or off the heating and change the temperature. However, to use the more advanced features, you’ll need to download the free Tado app for both Android and iOS. You can set a schedule for home and away for each thermostat. You can set the home or away manually or choose to do it via geofencing. This works by giving Tado access to your phone’s location services so that it will know when you’re close to home or away at work.
Each thermostat can have its own schedule so if you want the heating on in your bedroom and kitchen first thing the morning for an hour that’s no problem. You can set it to be on for a couple of hours in the morning and again just before you come home in the evenings and then have a different schedule for weekends. You may even choose to use it fully manually, but being able to turn on the heating before you go home from work or after a weekend away is a massive bonus.
You can do a lot more than just control the heating because each thermostat has built-in sensors for temperature, humidity and the Air Comfort feature uses these, as well as data from the internet, to provide suggestions for adjusting the temperature. It may suggest it’s too cold or too hot in a room and to turn on the heating or that the humidity is too high. It will tell you the outside and inside temperature and how good the air quality index is. It might say “feeling too stuffy at home? It’s better not to dry clothes inside the room.”
The system can detect if you open a window in a room that has the heating on. If it does, it will automatically turn off the heating in that room to conserve energy. However, this feature along with geofencing and Care and Protect are an additional service that you will have to subscribe to for €2.99 per month or €24.99 per year. If you don’t want to pay the subscription, you will still get an alert but will have to manually turn off the heating instead of the system doing it for you automatically.
The Tado smart home heating system is compatible with Apple HomeKit, Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant support. This is a nice to have feature if you own a smart assistant like an Echo or Nest smart speaker. If you’re feeling a little hot while working intensely on a project in your home office, just say Alexa, turn up the heating to 18C.
Overall, the Tado v3+ system with smart radiator thermostats is a fantastic way to bring an old heating system like mine into the modern age. It can give you complete control over how much heat you want in each room and offers a lot of high tech features that will add to the comfort and ease of use. I love the ability to group thermostats into rooms as zones. For example, you can have all your bedrooms as one zone and then a different zone for living room and kitchen.
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
