Best Wifi enabled thermostat
Discussion
LocoBlade said:
If that's the case maybe try leaving the bedrooms a bit cooler overnight then simply schedule the boiler to fire for the hotter temperature 15 minutes before people get up as I agree that the perception of heat often overcomes the actual room temperature so getting up with the room at 16c but the radiators hot might be better than 17c and the rads cold.
Alternatively set an artificially high target in the hour when you get up. If you set say 23c between 7-8am before dropping back to your 17c or so, that way the rads will always be on when you get up as the target won't be reached but given you've said the house only gains about 1c per hour its never going to get much above 18c in that hour and if it does go over then it won't run the boiler for a while once it drops back to 17c so you're not going to lose much in terms of energy consumption.
I dont have any tado trv (conventional only), just the smart stat in the hall. The bedroom ones are set at 3 (roughly 18) with unused rooms at 2.Alternatively set an artificially high target in the hour when you get up. If you set say 23c between 7-8am before dropping back to your 17c or so, that way the rads will always be on when you get up as the target won't be reached but given you've said the house only gains about 1c per hour its never going to get much above 18c in that hour and if it does go over then it won't run the boiler for a while once it drops back to 17c so you're not going to lose much in terms of energy consumption.
When my other half gets up for work at 6, I had a block set to come on at 0530 at 18 (from a low 16 start) which then changed to 17 at 0700 when she left. It was always just under 17 by 0700 so the end result was the same and it did get the boiler to fire up on schedule creating the illusion of warmth via the radiators being hot.
It was at this point that I noticed that the smart stat was calling for heat for 15 mins, shutting it down for 5 mins then calling for heat a second time which prompted the support ticket and this whole snowball.
However, they have seemingly tweaked something and it now calls for heat for the (nearly) full duration as it shuts off before the desired temp and the pump does the rest so I can always 'trick' it again when everyone is back at work.
Am seeing how it goes with a 17.5 all day temperature though as if that lasts all day again like it did yesterday then may actually be better than having the step up in the evening as the boiler has only been on one rather than twice, saving heating the water a second time.
Sheepshanks said:
I've got the Installer App and was using the info on the installer pages over the weekend to try and find the right set-up options. I'd be a bit nervous about scanning things now as it may well be sending that info back to Tado and causing them to make system changes.
My system was installed as part of a house refurb earleir this year and the electrician wired in the receiver and then I set it all up, just using the normal consumer App. I do recall some uncertainty with how water set-up but I got it going. Also getting the TRVs to fire the boiler didn't sem to be an issue, it just worked. Yet I've read of others who had to get Tado to enable that.
To answer your first point and save me quoting it My system was installed as part of a house refurb earleir this year and the electrician wired in the receiver and then I set it all up, just using the normal consumer App. I do recall some uncertainty with how water set-up but I got it going. Also getting the TRVs to fire the boiler didn't sem to be an issue, it just worked. Yet I've read of others who had to get Tado to enable that.
I have a glow worm boiler and they confirmed that if you have e-bus enabled then it will heat the water at a fixed temp and modulate the heating flow rate according to whatever tado decides. Or you can buy the glow worm smart stat and controller and have it do that instead.For the installer app to work, you need to scan the QR code on the bridge so it links the app to your account. It then displays the various settings depending what option you pick on the app. Am very curious so see what is under the 'system check' icon. Configuration lets you define the system without having to go via the installer menu. Mine is R01 (s or y plan) which is correct but there are other options like D01 (opentherm), D07 (e-Bus), etc showing.
Have no idea if it actually sends anything back to base as I cant get mine to pair.
KTF said:
To answer your first point and save me quoting it I have a glow worm boiler and they confirmed that if you have e-bus enabled then it will heat the water at a fixed temp and modulate the heating flow rate according to whatever tado decides. Or you can buy the glow worm smart stat and controller and have it do that instead.
It's a while since I looked at this, but I thought the issue was that it can't have both relay and e-Bus outputs at the same time. So without the relay output it won't open the motorised valves in a system set up. Is my understanding wrong? I have a glow worm boiler and they confirmed that if you have e-bus enabled then it will heat the water at a fixed temp and modulate the heating flow rate according to whatever tado decides. Or you can buy the glow worm smart stat and controller and have it do that instead.I haven't worried about it much as I've also got a Glow Worm boiler too - Energy 7 30s - and it only modulates down to 7.5kW and in practice it seems to run at that most of the time anyway.
ETA: Re the consumer App. What seemed odd in relooking at this (as I said, for a friend who just bought a system) is that it seemed to assume you were swapping from some other controller, and if not, it wanted to know model of boiler, hence I'd put his combi in. There doesn't seem to be an option for "no existing controller" or a basic "2 port valve setup". With valves, the boiler is irrelevant of course, as all the Tado is doing is driving the valves.
Edited by Sheepshanks on Monday 26th December 11:15
Sheepshanks said:
It's a while since I looked at this, but I thought the issue was that it can't have both relay and e-Bus outputs at the same time. So without the relay output it won't open the motorised valves in a system set up. Is my understanding wrong?
I haven't worried about it much as I've also got a Glow Worm boiler too - Energy 7 30s - and it only modulates down to 7.5kW and in practice it seems to run at that most of the time anyway.
Not sure to be honest. I thought the relay was on/off so tado would switch it on but tell the boiler to be at a low flow temperature? At the moment the relay only comes on at 3 wiggles (you can hear the click of the room stat when it does this).I haven't worried about it much as I've also got a Glow Worm boiler too - Energy 7 30s - and it only modulates down to 7.5kW and in practice it seems to run at that most of the time anyway.
I have an ultracom 18xhi (conventional) and it goes low/med/high flame to get the water up to temp then lowers the flame once its reached the flow temp and modulates (gas rather than flow temp) from there.
No idea if it is modulating anything or even condensing though as there is no way of finding out on the display. I check the plume every now and again for clues but hard to tell as its always producing something due to the cooler air temp.
KTF said:
The problem is my other half expects the radiators to be on when she gets up otherwise the house isn't classed as 'warm' so if tado decides to delay putting the heating on until after 30 minutes of the prescribed on time it doesn't go down well.
If you have this problem, then opentherm wont fix it. It more likely to make it worse as it will have more control over sending out luke warm water to top up a room just a little bit.As has been said thermostats have hysteresis so they are not constantly cycling on and off, Smart stats have a kind of anticipated hysteresis too, they also know the heat they are pumping into the system now isn't going to show up on the thermostat for some time and will act accordingly now, and as I described previously they are using pulse width modulation (in terms of minutes and hours) to control an uncontrollable heat output from the boiler and can be pretty good at it especially as they are also pulling in weather data to make a guess at how much of that heat is going straight through the walls and glass to outside.
As I explained to MIL who has red hot radiators, a dumb stat, no TRVs and complains that its either boiling hot or freezing. By the time the stat sees the setpoint temp there is still a good few degrees of room temp gain stored up in the red hot radiators and that inevitably causes it to overshoot. Of course its too hot for her so the stat gets turned down but then the result of that is it wont come on until the rads are stone cold and the room is plummeting past the now lower on trigger temperature.
If you want stable room temps you HAVE to forget the idea of hot radiators when there is not a massive heat demand and or loss.
Sheepshanks said:
KTF said:
What is now bothering me (a bit) is that tado hq can make changes to your system, not explain what they are then disappear for Christmas.
There are lots of things they can tweak that we can’t see or have access to it seems.
I may have brought this on myself as I was messing around in the App looking for installation instructions for a friend who's bought Tado for his Combi.There are lots of things they can tweak that we can’t see or have access to it seems.
On Saturday I became aware the hot water icon wasn't responding in the App - and, as the App sometimes just sits there and doesn't open on my phone (but works fine on wife's identical phone) I deleted and reinstalled it only for the hot water icon to disappear altogether!
At first it seemed (but this just might be me making an assumption) that the extension kit / receiver thought I had a combi but the button pressing sequence to change its status didn't do anything. Then I looked at the wireless thermostat and that didn't have hot water enabled. So enabled it - although quickly trying to find what all the various options and settings mean wasn't easy - and I still don't know them all.
Having done that, the receiver's status was now in two valve mode. Great! I was surprised to see the wireless thermostat had created another room and put itself in there. Hmmm... moved it to where it was supposed to be.
But the hot water still wouldn't turn on. So, as the heating was working fine and with Christmas Day next day, I decided to call it quits and left it alone - I could manually open the hot water motorised valve if needed as long as the boiler was runnning for the heating.
This morning I've gone through the whole process again and it seems to be working.
Very annoying that I couldn't sort this out on Saturday and also that there's no apparent way of operating the system manually, although allegedly there is if you have no internet connection for some time. I think I'll have to test that at some point. I had thought the two buttons on the receiver were manual on / off but they're only test buttons and turn off again after 2 mins.
I had pinged a support request in on Saturday but unsurprisingly had no response.
I travel a lot for work and rather than try and remotely diagnose any potential issues when my other half is home and I’m away I can just say “turn it on manually using the instructions on the back of the door”
No internet shouldn’t mean no heating but with Tado it sometimes does depending on your system.
KTF said:
Sheepshanks said:
It's a while since I looked at this, but I thought the issue was that it can't have both relay and e-Bus outputs at the same time. So without the relay output it won't open the motorised valves in a system set up. Is my understanding wrong?
I haven't worried about it much as I've also got a Glow Worm boiler too - Energy 7 30s - and it only modulates down to 7.5kW and in practice it seems to run at that most of the time anyway.
Not sure to be honest. I thought the relay was on/off so tado would switch it on but tell the boiler to be at a low flow temperature? At the moment the relay only comes on at 3 wiggles (you can hear the click of the room stat when it does this).I haven't worried about it much as I've also got a Glow Worm boiler too - Energy 7 30s - and it only modulates down to 7.5kW and in practice it seems to run at that most of the time anyway.
LocoBlade said:
KTF said:
Sheepshanks said:
It's a while since I looked at this, but I thought the issue was that it can't have both relay and e-Bus outputs at the same time. So without the relay output it won't open the motorised valves in a system set up. Is my understanding wrong?
I haven't worried about it much as I've also got a Glow Worm boiler too - Energy 7 30s - and it only modulates down to 7.5kW and in practice it seems to run at that most of the time anyway.
Not sure to be honest. I thought the relay was on/off so tado would switch it on but tell the boiler to be at a low flow temperature? At the moment the relay only comes on at 3 wiggles (you can hear the click of the room stat when it does this).I haven't worried about it much as I've also got a Glow Worm boiler too - Energy 7 30s - and it only modulates down to 7.5kW and in practice it seems to run at that most of the time anyway.
I suspect that you can find a suitable point on the PCB that is +V when the OpenTherm is operating the boiler for the hot water and solder a wire on that you can then use to trigger your own relay and open the zone valve that way, but given Tado doesn't monitor tank temperature or do anything useful on the hot water side really, if you want OpenTherm I would just use soemthing else to manage the hotwater side.
paralla said:
I strongly recommend turning off your WiFi and working out how to operate your heating and hot water manually with whatever Tado system you have. I’ve taken a couple of photos of my controls and printed an idiots guide to turning on the boiler manually. The instruction sheet is stuck to the inside door of the boiler cupboard.
I travel a lot for work and rather than try and remotely diagnose any potential issues when my other half is home and I’m away I can just say “turn it on manually using the instructions on the back of the door”
No internet shouldn’t mean no heating but with Tado it sometimes does depending on your system.
Yes, I travel too. First night away after having Tado my wife messaged and asked if there was anything she needed to do to Tado so she could have a bath! She has the App on her phone and the hot water was on. It doesn't bear thinking about if the system went down.I travel a lot for work and rather than try and remotely diagnose any potential issues when my other half is home and I’m away I can just say “turn it on manually using the instructions on the back of the door”
No internet shouldn’t mean no heating but with Tado it sometimes does depending on your system.
I'm toying with wiring a 2 gang switch across the Tado outputs (so driving the motorised valves). If left on that would heat the hot water to the boiler flow temp, which is a bit hotter than we have it normally, but not too bad. I think the TRVs would need to be removed in rooms where heating was required - probably easiest thing for her to do is just unscrew the lock rings as demounting heads is a bit uncertain if you don't know what's happening as the base can move.
paulrockliffe said:
Yes, but Sheeps is right, the Tado Extension Kit will either use OpenTherm to control the boiler, or it will use its relay to open the valve for the hot water cylinder, it won't do both. They should have reconfigured the hardware when they added Open Therm, but they did it on the cheap.
I suspect that you can find a suitable point on the PCB that is +V when the OpenTherm is operating the boiler for the hot water and solder a wire on that you can then use to trigger your own relay and open the zone valve that way, but given Tado doesn't monitor tank temperature or do anything useful on the hot water side really, if you want OpenTherm I would just use soemthing else to manage the hotwater side.
You'd have to get the boiler to ignore OpenTherm when heating hot water and that would mean - which might be acceptable - the rads heating up more when heating was being called for at the same time.I suspect that you can find a suitable point on the PCB that is +V when the OpenTherm is operating the boiler for the hot water and solder a wire on that you can then use to trigger your own relay and open the zone valve that way, but given Tado doesn't monitor tank temperature or do anything useful on the hot water side really, if you want OpenTherm I would just use soemthing else to manage the hotwater side.
I guess some of the boiler manufactuers' own controls can deal with this, but whether they could be used in conjunction with Tado, I don't know. I suppose you could still use Tado to control the TRVs and just not link them to them to the zone controller - so they wouldn't know what was going on with the boiler, they'd just open and close according to their schedule and temperatures and get whatevr temperature of water the boiler decided to send them.
Edited by Sheepshanks on Monday 26th December 21:58
Quick question,
How much do people think opentherm actually saves over tpi?
2% 5% ?
Even opentherm will shut off the boiler if power outstrips load.
Other than a smoother flow what's the difference?
The boiler won't "constantly" run super low and never shut off, what's the difference really between that and relay tpi chopping the load up into segments to lower flow?
How much do people think opentherm actually saves over tpi?
2% 5% ?
Even opentherm will shut off the boiler if power outstrips load.
Other than a smoother flow what's the difference?
The boiler won't "constantly" run super low and never shut off, what's the difference really between that and relay tpi chopping the load up into segments to lower flow?
shady lee said:
what's the difference really between that and relay tpi chopping the load up into segments to lower flow?
I expect that the effect/outcome in terms of stable temperature and minimum/nil overshoot are fairly similar however there are some obvious inefficiencies and drawbacks with how the pulse-width TPI control achieves it related to it running flat out when on (thus reducing opportunity for condensing, increasing thermal stress etc), increasing cycling stresses from valves opening and closing, and wastage of heat from the pre and post-purging of the combustion chamber.As to quantifying the significance and impact of these aspects I have no idea, but whilst I'm a big fan of the performance of TPI (or at least Honeywell's implementation of it) I do have some concerns about the potential for accelerated wear on the system.
Edited by tux850 on Monday 26th December 15:45
Overall I'd be surprised if it was more than single digit % gains but it will give savings when it is actually running because the lower the flow/return temperature, the more efficient the boiler will be due to more condensing, only by a few % but it would definitely be a factor.
Another advantage could be that even if it does still cycle due to lack of load, when it fires again it will do so knowing there's only a small load requirement and fire accordingly. If you just switch a boiler on with no other input it doesn't know what the demand is so boilers seem to generally be programmed to initially deliver quite a lot of output then react to the return flow temperatures (that might take a few minutes to settle) to fully modulate, whereas with ebus control the controls should be telling the boiler the load and so the output required from the outset meaning it can start up and stay at a low output. When our Vaillant on its own weather comp controls fires intermittently for 5-10 minutes about once an hour through the night due to lack of demand maintaining a lower house temperature it uses a really small amount of gas, less than half a KWh for each burn in many cases. I don't have the comparison data from when we had on/off controls but I'm pretty sure it would use quite a bit more than that in that kind of scenario.
Another advantage could be that even if it does still cycle due to lack of load, when it fires again it will do so knowing there's only a small load requirement and fire accordingly. If you just switch a boiler on with no other input it doesn't know what the demand is so boilers seem to generally be programmed to initially deliver quite a lot of output then react to the return flow temperatures (that might take a few minutes to settle) to fully modulate, whereas with ebus control the controls should be telling the boiler the load and so the output required from the outset meaning it can start up and stay at a low output. When our Vaillant on its own weather comp controls fires intermittently for 5-10 minutes about once an hour through the night due to lack of demand maintaining a lower house temperature it uses a really small amount of gas, less than half a KWh for each burn in many cases. I don't have the comparison data from when we had on/off controls but I'm pretty sure it would use quite a bit more than that in that kind of scenario.
Generally, a saving of around 6% is expected when moving from on/of to OpenTherm control on similar hardware.
Interestingly, when I installed the Tado system at our place recently, I found out that the installers had used on/off steering on our system, despite it being OT compatible I've since switched over, assuming it would at least save to some extent (it was during the search for info on OT I found the 6% number), though the ability to play with the temperatures and allow for a bit more comfort might undo some of those benefits...
Interestingly, when I installed the Tado system at our place recently, I found out that the installers had used on/off steering on our system, despite it being OT compatible I've since switched over, assuming it would at least save to some extent (it was during the search for info on OT I found the 6% number), though the ability to play with the temperatures and allow for a bit more comfort might undo some of those benefits...
shady lee said:
I've ordered a tado EU opentherm receiver to have a play with.
You can now set the dhw (combi) and max Ch flow rate via the installers app so I will report back once it arrives and is fitted.
I have mine connected via ebus to a Gloworm combi and there's no option to do that that I can see.You can now set the dhw (combi) and max Ch flow rate via the installers app so I will report back once it arrives and is fitted.
That said I can do it via the installer menu on the boiler.
Spent some time experimenting with it yesterday to see what it does. It really is very clever.
Wombat3 said:
I have mine connected via ebus to a Gloworm combi and there's no option to do that that I can see.
That said I can do it via the installer menu on the boiler.
Spent some time experimenting with it yesterday to see what it does. It really is very clever.
Have you tried the tado installer app for setting the temps? That said I can do it via the installer menu on the boiler.
Spent some time experimenting with it yesterday to see what it does. It really is very clever.
It had a update a month ago apparently to make it settable via that Vs emailing tado to set it for you.
https://community.tado.com/en-gb/discussion/8611/r...
Edited by shady lee on Thursday 29th December 16:40
https://status.heatmiser.com/ says all is OK?
I had a heatmiser system in my previous home; the hub did benefit from a periodic reboot. I ended up putting the router and the heatmiser hub onto a timer that would shut it down for 1 minute every Sunday morning at 3 AM - seemed to prevent the infrequent but annoying dropouts.
I had a heatmiser system in my previous home; the hub did benefit from a periodic reboot. I ended up putting the router and the heatmiser hub onto a timer that would shut it down for 1 minute every Sunday morning at 3 AM - seemed to prevent the infrequent but annoying dropouts.
I think something weird has gone on. My hub was online and the app could connect but all zones were offline.
Tried repairing the stats with the hub, no go. Ended updeleting all my zones, then the site itself. Repaired and all ok.
Noticed the app itself has had an update though. Wonder if it's related.
Tried repairing the stats with the hub, no go. Ended updeleting all my zones, then the site itself. Repaired and all ok.
Noticed the app itself has had an update though. Wonder if it's related.
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