tado
About the vendor and its products
tado offers a small number of products for climate control. The three main products are:
Smart thermostat for central heating and underfloor heating
Smart thermostat for radiator
Smart control device for climate control
A temperature sensor, which also shows the measured temperature on a display that looks like the one the thermostats have
The former two require an internet bridge, which is part of kits.
tado has its own app for controlling the thermostats, but also offers support for Apple Home, Google Home, Amazon Echo, and IFTTT.
Our experiences
When I started our project to smarten up our home, a tado smart thermostat was actually the very first smart home device I ever purchased, intended to control the underfloor heating in the conservatory. The project seemed very promising, being very easy to install, up to the point where I was about to connect the floor temperature sensor. That was when I discovered that tado doesn’t support external temperature sensors, and since the thermostat would be placed next to the door outside the actual room, this was not a good solution. Thus, we ended up with thermostats from Heatmiser, which allow choosing among floor sensor, external room sensor, and the built-in sensor.
As a reversal of this, for controlling the living room heat pump, a Sensibo Sky was replaced with a tado AC controller, primarily because the tado version has Apple Home support, see details below.
Notice that on phones, the table might only display in landscape mode
| Component | Room | Experiences |
|---|---|---|
Smart AC Control V3+ inverter control |
After some bother to change the default mode to heat, not cool, it has worked very well. It is also good-looking and it can also be manually operated from the device itself. Lately, I also discovered that it can set in a mode where it takes over all functionality of the inverter, including temperature measurement, and we have noticed that the inverter is now completely turned off for longer periods. Previously, it would remain on and often keep blowing rather cool air, so I assume that this saves even more power. |