Best Wifi enabled thermostat
Discussion
ADogg said:
Fwiw ShadyLee I stuck with Wiser (I used to have a B&B and we spoke about it lots!) and in my house with a mesh WiFi system it’s been a peach to use, compared to what it was!
Yeah Wiser seems very solid these days. However it's still lacking in some of the more complex "connected" features the more expensive products offer. shady lee said:
After 5 years with evohome I've sold/selling the lot on eBay and made the move to tado.
No real reason, evohome has been faultless.
I simply want more modem geofencing, temperature recording and more modern looking hardware.
The irony here is that Tado went into my house when it was fresh to the market when I refurbed the house. And that was 9 years ago! It hasn't changed substantially in function or design since, yet it's still streets ahead when it comes to simply setting up the heating and leaving it to look after itself.No real reason, evohome has been faultless.
I simply want more modem geofencing, temperature recording and more modern looking hardware.
It does suffer from its age in some respects though; the Extension Kit doesn't have the hardware to support both Open Therm boiler control and the Zone Valve for a hot water tank, so there is some compromise if you have both. It also doesn't have a temperature feed from the tank so your hot water control is limited to being able to turn it on and off remotely and the geofencing. There's no nuanced program, which you don't really need, but also no feedback on how much hot water you have available or when the boiler was actually heating.
I think part of that is down to a lack of demand outside of the UK for that sort of setup.
If you have an unvented cylinder and either an Open Therm boiler or you want more feedback I would consider putting it on it's own controller with whatever systems out there offer remote on/off and tank temperature monitoring.
paulrockliffe said:
The irony here is that Tado went into my house when it was fresh to the market when I refurbed the house. And that was 9 years ago! It hasn't changed substantially in function or design since, yet it's still streets ahead when it comes to simply setting up the heating and leaving it to look after itself.
Given the evohome's basic strength is simply setting up the heating and looking after itself, what then can be streets ahead about the tado? Genuinely curious - I'm not that enamoured with evohome after 4 or 5 years with it, but I'm not sure anything will actually be better and it's more about having a drafty old house than anything, heating a newbuild is a doddle in comparison!nebpor said:
paulrockliffe said:
The irony here is that Tado went into my house when it was fresh to the market when I refurbed the house. And that was 9 years ago! It hasn't changed substantially in function or design since, yet it's still streets ahead when it comes to simply setting up the heating and leaving it to look after itself.
Given the evohome's basic strength is simply setting up the heating and looking after itself, what then can be streets ahead about the tado? Genuinely curious - I'm not that enamoured with evohome after 4 or 5 years with it, but I'm not sure anything will actually be better and it's more about having a drafty old house than anything, heating a newbuild is a doddle in comparison!paulrockliffe said:
nebpor said:
paulrockliffe said:
The irony here is that Tado went into my house when it was fresh to the market when I refurbed the house. And that was 9 years ago! It hasn't changed substantially in function or design since, yet it's still streets ahead when it comes to simply setting up the heating and leaving it to look after itself.
Given the evohome's basic strength is simply setting up the heating and looking after itself, what then can be streets ahead about the tado? Genuinely curious - I'm not that enamoured with evohome after 4 or 5 years with it, but I'm not sure anything will actually be better and it's more about having a drafty old house than anything, heating a newbuild is a doddle in comparison!Loads of people seem to rate Tado but given how well my floors attenuate wifi I doubt direct RF communication would work for me. I need to look in to Zigbee ones.
RizzoTheRat said:
They can both use IFTT can't they, which should mean geolocation is possible.
Loads of people seem to rate Tado but given how well my floors attenuate wifi I doubt direct RF communication would work for me. I need to look in to Zigbee ones.
They can, but Tado geolocation works out of the box without every user requiring an IFTTT account and to go through the process of setting up routines manually for both turning on Home and Away mode. You would lose the ability to pre-warm the house automatically and for the house away temperature to be correlated with your distance form home.Loads of people seem to rate Tado but given how well my floors attenuate wifi I doubt direct RF communication would work for me. I need to look in to Zigbee ones.
But really the setup requirements mean you would want some significant benefit in another system for it to be worth getting involved with. I use IFTTT with Google WiFi to setup guests as triggers for Home mode, but it's a pain to manage!
dmsims said:
Geolocation = come home to a cold house
It depends on how long you go out for, how fast your house cools down and how quickly it heats up. The Tado algorithm at least tries to get a good balance between knowing your house needs to be heated as you're going home and not having it on when you're not going home. If you're implying that without geolocation you would be manually turning the heating on when you start heading home, well you can do that with Tado anyway if the geolocation isn't going to sort you out. It's usually good enough though.
I find the house is only cold if I've been away for a few days and a couple of hours away as Geolocation can't work out I'm on my way home until it's too late. I use IFTTT to send alerts if the house is particularly cold, which help remind me to pre-heat when I'm going home.
But the main benefit is that it turns itself off when you go out I suppose.
dickymint said:
Then you either haven't got geo, got a crap geo or not setting it up right. Tado works!!
is the wrong answerMany scenarios where it doesn't work - I go and see my sister for a week in Scotland, fly back back home 25 minute drive back to a cold house
It's a solution looking for a problem that doesn't exist
dmsims said:
dickymint said:
Then you either haven't got geo, got a crap geo or not setting it up right. Tado works!!
is the wrong answerMany scenarios where it doesn't work - I go and see my sister for a week in Scotland, fly back back home 25 minute drive back to a cold house
It's a solution looking for a problem that doesn't exist
much easier to just turn it on and off from my phone if im going out for any long period
dmsims said:
dickymint said:
Then you either haven't got geo, got a crap geo or not setting it up right. Tado works!!
is the wrong answerMany scenarios where it doesn't work - I go and see my sister for a week in Scotland, fly back back home 25 minute drive back to a cold house
It's a solution looking for a problem that doesn't exist
dickymint said:
A bit cryptic there - are you saying due to flying Geo doesn't work? Is 25 minutes not enough time to warm your house? Or is it that your boiler can't achieve what you want out of Geo?
I think it's more accurate to say it works as best it can, there's no way it can work in that scenario. Whether it's possible to heat the house quickly enough, depends on the time available to heat and the heat required. If I'm a way for two weeks in the winter the house may be down at 9 degrees and the fabric of the building is the same, so the time to heat is several hours. Not sure when Tado will kick in, but even our over-sized radiators won't heat at the rate required if I'm 100 miles away and travelling at 50 mph.
Of course if I'm 100 miles away, am I travelling home? I could get to within 20, 10 miles and still not actually go home. So there's some compromise there and that causes a delay that means it's still definitely cold when you get home!
What Tado does is change the minimum set temperature depending on your distance from home, so it's really minimising the amount of cold in proportion to a rough estimate of how likely you are to end up at home soon.
But the alternative is to turn it on manually, which Tado does just the same as any alternative so you're not losing anything in these scenarios and where Tado is really good is when you pop out for a few hours, the heating just goes off when you leave and when you come back the house isn't cold and quickly restores to its set temperature.
I'm sure it's possible to overcome the limitations though, for me I put where I'm going in a calendar with location and start/end dates. I can access and format that into a list of dates where I'm travelling home after a period away and I'm sure there's a way to turn that into an IFTTT conditional trigger to automate the manual setting of the heating on those days.
These comments around geofencing not working are pointing towards other issues with the efficiency of people's heating system, insulation and/or the size of your home. I've yet to have an issue with it not getting the house up to an acceptable temperature when I've been away. Our house isn't particularly well insulated but our heating system is new with decent sized radiators and there's no issue getting rooms up to temperature quickly.
Geofencing wasn't the selling point of Tado for me. Day to day it's no use for us as my wife works round the corner from the house. I simply preferred the devices and the interface over Evohome. I do wish it was a bit smarter in terms of learning though. We had a supposedly dumber Nest system in our old house but it really was fit and forget for about 8 years. I seem to be constantly farting about with the schedules in Tado. Not being able to turn a single room completely off with 1 click is also a pain in the arse.
Geofencing wasn't the selling point of Tado for me. Day to day it's no use for us as my wife works round the corner from the house. I simply preferred the devices and the interface over Evohome. I do wish it was a bit smarter in terms of learning though. We had a supposedly dumber Nest system in our old house but it really was fit and forget for about 8 years. I seem to be constantly farting about with the schedules in Tado. Not being able to turn a single room completely off with 1 click is also a pain in the arse.
Sheepshanks said:
LocoBlade said:
Apparently with properly set up weather compensating boiler / controls (Veissmann seem to be the best, followed by Vaillant), you can run the system without ANY indoor thermostats at all because the boiler/controls will modulate the heat output into the heating circuits into the house to reach an equilibrium of heat in = heat out at the desired target temperature (say 20c), and the weather compensation will adjust the output based on outside temperatures so the inside temperature will remain the same without actually knowing what the inside temperature is.
I’m not sure what the right term is, but do these boilers modulate down far enough for that to work effectively? I guess it also depends how many rads are in the circuit.I recall trying weather comp on the Worcester Wave system in daughter’s house and I think it ran the pump all the time as it needs to continually monitor flow and return temps - and her boiler is one of the last without one of the new variable power pumps.
If you've got a heat pump then good weather comp is even more important I think, as heat pump efficiency differences between a low and high running temperatures is far greater than the 5-10% difference of a gas boiler
paulrockliffe said:
dickymint said:
A bit cryptic there - are you saying due to flying Geo doesn't work? Is 25 minutes not enough time to warm your house? Or is it that your boiler can't achieve what you want out of Geo?
I think it's more accurate to say it works as best it can, there's no way it can work in that scenario. Whether it's possible to heat the house quickly enough, depends on the time available to heat and the heat required. If I'm a way for two weeks in the winter the house may be down at 9 degrees and the fabric of the building is the same, so the time to heat is several hours. Not sure when Tado will kick in, but even our over-sized radiators won't heat at the rate required if I'm 100 miles away and travelling at 50 mph.
Of course if I'm 100 miles away, am I travelling home? I could get to within 20, 10 miles and still not actually go home. So there's some compromise there and that causes a delay that means it's still definitely cold when you get home!
What Tado does is change the minimum set temperature depending on your distance from home, so it's really minimising the amount of cold in proportion to a rough estimate of how likely you are to end up at home soon.
But the alternative is to turn it on manually, which Tado does just the same as any alternative so you're not losing anything in these scenarios and where Tado is really good is when you pop out for a few hours, the heating just goes off when you leave and when you come back the house isn't cold and quickly restores to its set temperature.
I'm sure it's possible to overcome the limitations though, for me I put where I'm going in a calendar with location and start/end dates. I can access and format that into a list of dates where I'm travelling home after a period away and I'm sure there's a way to turn that into an IFTTT conditional trigger to automate the manual setting of the heating on those days.
RizzoTheRat said:
They can both use IFTT can't they, which should mean geolocation is possible.
Loads of people seem to rate Tado but given how well my floors attenuate wifi I doubt direct RF communication would work for me. I need to look in to Zigbee ones.
When life 360 was still on ifttt evohome geo worked pretty well, ever since they left anything else I've tried has been a clunky delayed faff.....Loads of people seem to rate Tado but given how well my floors attenuate wifi I doubt direct RF communication would work for me. I need to look in to Zigbee ones.
The geo for me is less coming home to a warm house, and more about my other half leaving the house to go on meetings all day and not turning it off. She does this without fail....
I was actually hoping Honeywell might have dropped a all new evohome by now.
Edited by shady lee on Tuesday 17th May 19:21
If you really want geolocation, you can achieve it with far more flexibility using pretty much any smart controls that integrates with a home automation app like Home Assistant. With the extreme example above of geolocation not working because you're flying into a nearby airport, with HA there's nothing stopping you adding a flight tracking integration then writing an automation to put the heating back on when your plane is on final approach 
shady lee said:
When life 360 was still on ifttt evohome geo worked pretty well, ever since they left anything else I've tried has been a clunky delayed faff.....
The geo for me is less coming home to a warm house, and more about my other half leaving the house to go on meetings all day and not turning it off. She does this without fail....
I was actually hoping Honeywell might have dropped a all new evohome by now.
You need to get a bit more creative. In IFTTT you can use conditions to change the heating between manual mode and schedule mode. I use this to set a hidden top-stop on the heating because my wife will also fThe geo for me is less coming home to a warm house, and more about my other half leaving the house to go on meetings all day and not turning it off. She does this without fail....
I was actually hoping Honeywell might have dropped a all new evohome by now.
Edited by shady lee on Tuesday 17th May 19:21
k about with it. If she's sat at her desk not moving for long enough she'll feel cold and rather than putting the temp up 1 degree it'll be set to 25. If the temperature goes over 21 IFTTT puts it back into manual mode so in reality any temperature over 21 degrees = 21 degrees.You must be able to come up with something that intervenes, maybe just have it turned off every hour or something.
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