Smart thermostats - any recommendations?

If you have a normal twisty oldschool thermostat then Tado will do exactly as you wish.

That is the exact thermostat that I replaced with Tado.

You need the Tado wired kit, not the wireless one. Oh and the Danfoss backplate has the terminals labelled, so replacing it with Tado is super simple.

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Oh neat not heard of these before, thanks!

I wonder why Nest decided to go down the heat-link route for the European market, the US ones just wire into the HVAC wiring like a normal thermostat

The majority of UK customers only have ā€˜heat’, whereas US customers have AC/heat - so the US product and the UK product differed. US Nest installs can heat & cool. UK Nest installs can only heat. At least as at 2014 when I installed my original Nest learning thermo.

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Makes sense, but it still feels like they could offer a product that is similar where you just attach the wires into the back of the unit, similar to the US version but just for heating.

I suspect the reason is because there are so many different standards across the EU/UK and the heat link is designed to accommodate all of them, but even so, a heatlink-less version would be nice.

I’m looking into this Tado product now, it seems to fit the bill!

I forgot to add that we also have two zones so we had two Danfoss thermostats. You’ll need two Tado wired thermostats for the swap, but you’ll be able to control everything from the Tado app rather than having two independent thermostats to manage.

We have the radiator valves too, which I would recommend, but having the thermostats-only is a good starting point.

Also worth mentioning that aside from the Black Friday deals, Tado sell refurbs on their website which are basically as good as buying new.

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I have gone with Tado, which i was very fortunate to get free from my OVO energy supplier.
Would highly recommend

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I’m not very good with things like this sooo :sweat_smile:

I’ve been thinking about replacing our Honeywell smart thermostat which is pretty useless - the app is unreliable and pretty featureless. It doesn’t learn and because I work from home but don’t always want the heating on - the geofence is pretty pointless.

How easy is it to swap out an existing wireless thermostat with something like Tado (which seems to generally be the most preferred in this thread!)

Pretty easy. We had some rubbish wireless thing when we moved so I replaced it with Tado. We had Tado previously but not the wireless part.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/tado°-Starter-Kit-Thermostat-Programmer/dp/B098BKHT3R?ref_=ast_sto_dp&th=1

One bit connects to the boiler, the slim part to your router and the thermostat goes wherever you please.

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Anyone with experience with Heatmiser NeoStat? https://www.amazon.co.uk/Thermostat-programmable-thermostat-illuminated-Kudos-Trading/dp/B0CMTX7MSD

I’m looking for HomeKit enabled thermostat, modern looking.

Tado works well and easy to setup.

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I also have a Tado. I agree it works well, but I do find it quite annoying that they charge for in-app analytics via their energy IQ feature (which I think is between £3 to £4 per month depending on when you started subscribing).

Am curious how other manufacturers approach this? Do they charge for in-app analytics, or is it available for free?

The energy IQ feature that I particularly like is the consumption graph comparing current month with prior month and with same month in the previous year: What does Energy IQ show me? | Help Center

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If you’re referring to the in-app analytics in the Octopus app, personally I think its quite limited. It surfaces data for current period but there are no comparisons with previous periods. Also, octopus doesn’t provide central heating-specific data. It provides overall gas consumption.

I am interested in setting up my own analytics dashboard using data exports or api. But it would probably take me a while to achieve this: I do know some programming basics but I’m not a trained programmer and not particularly familiar with the advanced analytics tools in Excel. At the moment its quite low down on my list of things to do.

If your gas smart meter actually works, and a good deal of them don’t, or haven’t been installed.

Curiously Tado do expose this data via an API that you don’t have to pay for. You could for example pull this into Home Assistant and graph it in there if you wanted to.

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I’ve never used Home Assistant but will take a look into this. Thanks.

I seem to remember at some point using a tool that pulled Tado data into Google Sheets. I didn’t ever actually do anything with the data, but I imagine that would be easier than Home Assistant.

There’s a community forum for Tado too, I’d have a snoop around there for ideas.

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So something that’s incredibly obvious but not really considered is the fact that TRVs (well Tado’s ones anyway) are actually terrible at measuring the temperature of the room and therefore controlling heating systems. Who would have thought that putting a thermometer right next to a massive heat source isn’t a good idea!

Anyway, this is what it looks like on a graph. This room only has TRVs detecting the temperature and calling for heat. The heating fires for short bursts but the room never really maintains the target temperature.

Compare it to this room where we have the zone controller on the opposite side of the room to the radiator. The radiator is a bypass so there’s no TRV. The heating demand is a lot more consistent throughout the day.

The room running on short bursts of heat is also less efficient because the boiler doesn’t run long enough to enter condensing mode.

Anyway Tado’s add-on temperature sensors are silly expensive for no reason, so I’ve bought another wired kit as it was cheaper. I’ll mount it on the wall unwired and use it as a temperature sensor away from the radiators. I also realise I could just buy another TRV and put it on a shelf in the room, but that’s a lot less tidy.

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Oh yes absolutely, my smart thermostats were all controlled by thermometers in places I actually sit - by the couch, by the kitchen table and over the bed - when I had this set up in my old place. Thermometers next to the radiator made no sense to me

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Same issue. We had to buy the Tado Wireless Temperature Sensor to go on the wall in every room of the house with a Tado TRV (7 in total) to get around this problem.

Luckily, got them for about £50 each when Amazon had a sale on.

They are quite inoffensive to look:

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Nice, I do have one of these already for one room - the radiator is in the corner of the room with the TRV right in the 90° corner so it was never going to work from the get-go. I just had a look back and we paid £49 refurbished direct from Tado.

Looking now, they want Ā£100+ for a new one and have no refurbs. I managed to find a black thermostat new on eBay for Ā£64, so I’m happy with that. It’s already on its way to me too.

Hopefully once it’s up our boiler will stop chucking out smoke when the living room calls for heat like the Hogwarts Express and run longer and more efficiency.

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