Video: Tado Smart Home Heating Control From Your Smartphone

Tado° launched their smart home heating control system in Germany, Austria and Switzerland around this time last year.  Now they’ve adapted their mobile app and developed a new connector kit especially designed for UK homes, as well as launching across the rest of Europe.

The two elements of the system are the tado box and the free iPhone / Android app.  The box connects to your heating system, replacing your existing wall thermostat or it can be directly attached to your boiler.  From there it communicates with your smartphone using your home’s Internet connection.  Of course there’s manual control in addition to the cloud service should you be away from your phone.  In addition there’s a neat little temperature sensor included in the tado° package that’s powered with photovoltaic cells so needs no wires.

Tado say their system has managed to cut home heating costs by an average of 27%. The system uses geolocation data to base heating schedules on your whereabouts as well as a learning algorithm to adapt to how quickly your house cools down or how the sunshine influences its interior temperature.

The Connector Kit is available to buy with lifetime service included for £249 or to rent for £6.99 on a monthly contract. Flex customers who decide on the rental plan even enjoy a savings guarantee…

Anyone who hasn’t cut their heating costs by at least £100 per year in the first year will have their rental payments for the last 12 months refunded,” Leopold v. Bismarck, CMO of tado°

tado-box

Currently tado do not offer an official API although they say they may introduce one in the future if there is enough community interest.  They reckon most people will be able to fit the system in under 30 minutes.  Check out the video below…

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15 Comments on "Video: Tado Smart Home Heating Control From Your Smartphone"

  1. Gary Quigley | December 9, 2013 at 10:25 am |

    I have a Tado installed and it’s just great to be able to control the heating from your smartphone or PC, whether you are at home or away. The greatest feature is the geofencing which detects you leaving the house, (via the app on your phone), it turns the heating down. However as you return, it detects how far you are and starts the heating again at an appropriate distance. Hence the house is only warm when it needs to be.

  2. Seems expensive for what it is, considering you could achieve something similar with a Micasaverde Vera, a z-wave room thermostat and a mobile app… (And you’d also then have a good HA controller that would open up many other options and possibilities .

  3. Order one at the beginning of the month. Only after ordering, was I informed they had none available. Still waiting so the customer service seems to be based on the app, like the heating, it seems to switch off once they have had your money. It is a shame, as it did sound like a fantastic bit of kit.

  4. Hi Christian, we can fully understand that you are upset and we want to apologise for the delay! Our product is cross-vendor compatible this means that we have to work with different digital and analog interfaces. So the delivery time depends on the specific heating system you have and which version of the tado° connector kit you need. There are systems we can ship immediately and there are systems that take several weeks to be ready for shipping. In addition, there happen to be some delays due to the high demand before Christmas and some delays with our production partner. We work really hard to ship the tado° Connector kits as soon as possible. Your tado° Team

  5. Recently ordered a kit and hoping for delivery soon. It looks as if it could be perfect for our family. My wife and I spend a lot of the year abroad ( which hopefully Tado will detect) leaving one of our sons at home. He works different shifts about 20 miles away so from what I can see it should manage the heating system for us much better than what we have now (single thermostat with 4 time periods). Initial thoughts are that we may need more than 2 time periods (day/night) as when we are home I think we would probably need at least 3 : night (lowest); day when we are doing things (mid temperature); evening relaxing (highest temp), but time will tell and hopefully the Tado people will be receptive to possible enhancements.

  6. Tado received and installed. I can see why Tado have rolled back on the easy self install claim as it isn’t something a novice should do. The instructions for all but a limited few boilers are hit and miss. But Tado have recognised this & do offer to arrange an installer and phone/email support is at hand. The build quality is good & comparable to most; ie plastic. But tado it is not about flashy design like the overly pimped out Nest, instead it rightly focuses on function. If you need guests noticing your thermostat please seek professional medical advice (it’s just a themostat, not an art installation). The Tado blends with its environment, it is sleek and discrete. Where it packs it’s punch is in the tech. It does exactly as advertised with the minium of fuss. Can’t comment as to savings as yet but so far pleased with the product.

  7. Thanks for the update Christian, let us know how it goes once up and running for a while.

  8. Received by Tado just before Christmas and although I had opted for installation I fitted it myself in 10 minutes following excellent instructions on the website. Excellent response from the support team over the Christmas holidays when an issue with the remote temp monitor resolved very quickly. Early days but great features and service bodes well for the future
    Would be good though to have at least two Home and Sleep periods possible each da

    Overall I would recommend!

  9. koolbikegirl | January 16, 2014 at 3:24 pm |

    Ordered Tado 2nd Dec it arrived 19th after many calls it was finally fitted today, we tried DIY fit it certainly needed an engineer, he was here 2 hours. Im finding my way now but agree several home/sleep periods would be a great help. I have a few other questions e.g. the app has facilities for hot water controls can I use them? And how will I know when the wireless room thermostat needs charged? I hope Tado sees this and can help 🙂 I shall report more after a good test period but im confident, apart from customer service which I think needs to catch up.

  10. I have had my Tado for about 2 weeks now and first impressions are favourable. I had opted for an engineer to fit but decided to do it myself. The online instructions for fitting did not include my setup which was a bit of a surprise as I have a fairly common Vaillant boiler and Horstmann Centaurstat7 controller. Fortunately it was not too difficult to sort out. I left my current controller in place (it was in the wrong place anyway for temperature control) but just turned it ‘off’ so that if we move it would be a simple job to reinstate it (also as backup….just in case). The tado unit I put next to the boiler where I replaced a frost thermostat. Initially it needed a separate power supply (only live and switched live from the boiler), but a question sent to Tado resulted in details of a third wire that I needed from the boiler. The thermostat now resides mainly in the kitchen/dining room which is our main living room during the day. However the temperature of the lounge where we spend evenings ends up lower than the kitchen (especially when cooking!) so the thermostat comes with us in the evenings into the lounge to warm that room up. This seems to work OK although the ability to have an additional time period would be useful.
    As for the detection of where we are and control of the boiler, that seems to be working well and from what I can see the boiler has been on less than it would have been previously, although cost savings will be difficult to estimate as our schedules are very random.
    Just 2 small gripes. A couple of days ago they changed their name server and it took about 48 hours for this to propagate.Although the tado at home continued to work according to the schedule I had set up I was not able to change settings which I wanted to do as the only person at home was returning at 1am. They really should have given some warnings beforehand! And contacting customer service by email can take a little time for a response – but a private message on facebook normally gets a very quick response, usually from Stefanie Sedlak their PR and Marketing manager.

  11. Buyer beware. I am UK based, I own this product and I can say it is crap. Don’t buy. It doesn’t work. I don’t know what kind of idiots have designed this thing but they really managed to screw it up. The thermostat doesn’t register on the iPhone app half the time and it doesn’t control the heating properly. Last night the house was at 21 deg all night. This is an example of piss poor execution and a complete waste of money!!!!!!!

  12. Andy Lewis | March 3, 2014 at 4:58 pm |

    I have now received my tado and installed it myself. (Not too hard).

    The install was pretty flawless bar having to perform paper clip resets on the devices a few times to get them speaking to each other. It has now been running for 48 hours and does the job.

    But…

    The geolocation feature is not working. When I switch this on it thinks my phone is away from home and so switches the heating off. I appear to have registered my correct address but no joy.

    I do hope this is fixed soon. (Support request sent.) Without this feature, the tado is little more than an app enabled heating thermostat.

  13. I have been looking at both Tado and Hive. Having exchanged several emails with Tado support/sales I can’t seem to get any sense out of them. My heating system is non-combi so it uses a hot water cylinder hence the hot water needs turning on and off. The Tado system looks like it only controls room heating (via thermostat). Does the Tado system have facility to control the hot water as well? I know Hive does but Tado support don’t seem to be able to answer the question.

  14. Hi Will, thank you for your interest in tado°! You have already been in contact with our support team so just a quick answer that tado° in general can control hot water. If your programmer/timer can control hot water and you replace it with tado° then tado° will also control hot water.

    At the moment the user can switch (in web and mobile app) hot water on/off or let tado° take control. When tado takes care there will be hot water when somebody is at home based on the tado presence detection. We will shortly be launching an update to our hot water control, which will allow you to configure a dedicated schedule for hot water preparation. In addition we will still be offering the current modes of operation. Your tado° Team

  15. Hi, We have a combi boiler, a controller for central heating and hot water. But considering that it is a combi boiler, do I beed Tado extension kit, or can I ignore the programmer? on Tado website the manual says that extension kit only works with certain heating systems. My boiler is ideal logic heat 30 and i have glow warm controller.

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