Owning your own home

Tado: a cautionary tale.

I, like others, picked up a thermostat and some rad valves a while ago. They went in fine and were doing what I expected them to do. I always had an issue here with the Hot Water though. For some reason, it was always on, even though the old controller was set to it being off. I had hoped that it was a duff controller and that adding the Tado extension kit would fix this as it brings the Hot Water controls under the Tado set up. I was wrong.

At first, I installed the extension kit and nothing was working. Turns out it takes a while for the firmware to update. Then when it did come up to speed, I found that

A) I had lost the ability for the individual TRVs to call for heat (as they were doing pre-extension kit). Instead, the Tado wall thermostat needed to be calling for heat for any of the rads to heat, even though the app showed them as calling for heat themselves and each room was set with the extension kit as their zone controller.

B) Now I needed the Hot Water to be set to ON in the app for anything to fire (as a result of this and the pre-exisitng HW issue, he HW has been permanently ON since we moved in).

I contacted Tado support about a week ago, nothing. I started finding all the ways possible to contact them and tried everything, multiple times. Nothing.

Last night I got desparate and starting hunting down anyone on Linkedin at Tado that looked like they had something to do with support or customer success. The only person to respond was the Head of Customer Success. I wrote them a very polite and apologetic message (raising a consumer support issue individually through Linkedin felt like a dick move) and they responded in minutes. They apologised and said they would get one of their managers onto it this morning.

A flurry of emails arrived at 8am this morning (they are a German company so I assume it was the first thing they did in their office hours) saying they had fixed the problem.

A) the thermostat needed to have a relay disabled from their side so that the individual TRVs could speak to the extension kit.

B) the extension kit needed to be changed to GRAVITY FED in order to separate the HW and CH controls (I remember at install time there was an option in the settings to replicate how the old controller was configured. In hindsight, this was likely wrong on the old controller which is why this never worked and why it persisted after the new install).

Fingers crossed but it does not seem to be working properly (or, as expected anyway). But, for the time being, don't rely on their support, without being prepared to be an annoying dick.

I have now also replaced all the old dumb TRVs with the Tado smart versions so can actually turn rads off in rooms we are not in (the smoker's bedroom rad was constantly on as the TRV there as fuckoed). That and not having the HW on permanently and also getting new double glazed windows in most of the house in a few weeks will hopefully bring our energy bill below the £300 I've just been quoted for our first month.....