The tadoº Smart Thermostat - exclusive price for OVO members!

Hi Tim, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I’ve only just joined the forum and don’t have a TADO system but I do have the Drayton Wiser system with a controller and TRV’s on most radiators.

I wrote a bit more about my experience here:

Have you got a smart thermostat? Then we'd love to hear from you! | The OVO Forum (ovoenergy.com)

There is also a good (and long) thread about the Wiser system here:

https://www.automatedhome.co.uk/reviews/drayton-wiser-smart-heating-controls-review-part-4-1-year-older-much-wiser.html

OVO Energy customers only I’m afraid. Sorry!

The OVO Forum is mainly volunteer led and runs independently of most of OVO’s operations. This forum is open to everyone regardless of supplier and makes no money by itself, so it’s unfortunately not possible to extend this kind of offer to forum members as well.

Hi @nealmurphy - Sorry for the delayed response on this one. We’d taken your comments away to the Smart Home team to query why this was only available to dual-fuel member.

For a bit of context they’ve advised:

Through this offer, we allow customers to "connect" their Tado account to their OVO account. This sends the heating data from Tado to OVO. We then match this with their smart, half-hourly, gas consumption data to provide hints, tips & info about their home heating. If a customer doesn't have a gas supply with OVO we don't have this data and therefore can't provide these insights. As the insights are a core part of the product we want to ensure a customer has everything they need to get the best out of their Tado.

Hope this helps explain the reasoning behind this. 

I bought a Tado from OVO. I won't work work our boiler. I have a long and very detailed email thread back and forth with Tado before I bought it, to check compatibility. They said yes. It arrived. The app can't give installation instructions for our Vaillant Boiler. So more emails with Tado. Finally they have admitted it's not compatible with any boiler that uses ebus communication, meaning all Vaillant boilers. It can be fitted but it won't work at its most smart, some features won't work. 

So how to return it please? I've emailed smarthome at OVO. Nothing. I managed to speak to someone on the phone a few weeks ago and I was promised a reply paid return bag. Nothing has arrived. I work in the week, not open at weekends. So I still don't have an address to return it to. 

Help anyone? Please?

Kim

Thank you. 

Hi Tim. Thank you for the reply. I had email conversations with several different people at Tado, and there's some considerable confusion about ebus connections. 

I'll try and be brief, but the conflicting advice at the time did have us really confused.

So, our daughter and her husband have Tado connected to a Vaillant boiler. So I assumed it would be fine with any Vaillant. To be sure though, I contacted Tado before buying to get confirmation. Initially despite me giving very detailed model numbers and set up info they clearly didn't know what we had, emails back and forth with me explaining, and finally I got a Yes, it's compatible. Our set up isn't the usual wired dumb wall thermostat, and I think that may partly be the problem and Tado certainly needed a lot of explaining. We don't have a combi boiler for a start and they kept using the word combi in the emails. We have a hot water tank. Then the thermostat is also the controller/timer all in one, and it's wireless with batteries so we can move it around round the house. There's something wired into the boiler housing that talks wirelessly to both the timer/thermostat and a controller installed next to the hot water tank upstairs to control the 3 way valve for hot water, heating, or both at the same time. So that's our set up. 

A normal wired to the wall Tado might have been easier, but then again depending on who you talked to, maybe not. 

I talked to our son in law and he immediately said yes, the Tado does control the heating, but they have a combi boiler. He can use the app to deal with times and settings etc, but the full "smart" facilities don't work with ebus. If it was fully smart there are extra features. I don't know the full details, but I believe it's to do with the weather and how high the heating runs. So on v cold days with info from the the internet the Tado would know to run the boiler at its highest temperature and if you use geo fencing it'll turn on sooner than on a less cold day. If it's really cold it will keep the heating on v low in the background to prevent freezing, but when it's mild it runs the boiler at a lower temperature. Basically it avoids peaks and troughs of temperatures that occur with a normal fully on or fully off system. Ebus is the only way that Vaillant allows that extra level of control of their boilers unfortunately. 

Our existing thermostat/timer is pretty sophisticated all ready with very flexible timing options, but we can't control it from the internet and the heating is either fully on or off and no smart TRVs. We wanted the extra bells and whistles of full smart features and it turns out the ONLY way to get that is to install Vaillant's own kit. At about 3 times the price. 🙁. 

I have since looked into this extensively, and it's true, you can only turn your Vaillant heating system fully smart with their own kit. Nest, Hive, Netatmo, all the same as Tado. All it does is turns your system into one you can control via the internet. Sadly this isn't well publicised. None of the smart control manufacturers really make the extra features clear in their marketing, nor that not all will be available on all boilers. Pretty poor really. 

Anyway, hey ho. We were thinking about Vaillant controls, but now there's talk of the new government grants towards heat pumps coming next year, and with our boiler being 13 years old now, we will probably wait until April and review at that point. 

I hope your Vaillant boiler does give you full smart functionality, but it may not. You may not be aware of that on a daily basis, but all I know is, the up to date Tado can't communicate with ebus. That is the only thing that everyone at Tado did agree on. Having said this, if you had a basic dumb thermostat previously, then it's definitely a better upgrade for you than it is for us. 

Kim

So this is why I'm peeved with Vaillant and Tado. Talk to each other please. Why are customers left feeling so confused.

One thing I didn't say was, I have had a written apology from Tado for giving the misleading information regarding our Vaillant system. As in they told me it would work, but later after it had arrived told me it wouldn't. 

That’s cool that Tado supports eBus - but do we think it is only devices pre September 2020?

I bought into the Nest system back in 2016, then moved to a house with a Valliant boiler. I have the Nest working “calling for heat”, but not modulation. I did briefly look into buying a opentherm/eBus module from the Netherlands, as Nest supports opentherm, but decided against it due to grumpy warnings from Vailllant about invalidating warranties.

Does anyone have any idea how you would calculate savings on modulation vs non-modulation? My plumber thought it wouldn’t be large sums per year.

I honestly don't know about e-Bus with boilers or boilers of different ages other than my own. I'm not a heating engineer, just a home owner. I did do some research and it looks like at some point the control board was upgraded and the newer version possibly would not play nice with e-Bus. Fortunately, for me, I guess my ten year old boiler was ancient enough.

I don't recall exactly where I saw the comments about the controller board, but I think it was somewhere within this forum, possibly others too - https://www.diynot.com/diy/search/208392992/?q=Tado+vaillant&o=relevance&c[node]=7

Regarding energy savings, again, beyond my skills and experience to comment. The important thing for condensing boilers, such as mine, is to keep the return temperature below 54C in order to maintain condensing function. 54C is really the upper ceiling. Lower is better for maximum condensing efficiency. As for any other boiler types I'm afraid I haven't got a clue. Sorry.

BTW, I'm still new to all this stuff. I only started taking an interest a month ago when I discovered that none of my 33 year old dumb TRVs were actually working. Not one of them opened and closed with temperature changes. They had become manual on/off wheellhead valves and had probably been like that for years. That's when I started looking for new TRVs and happened upon Tado. Initially I just bought only the TRVs, but quickly (two days later) added the smart thermostat and a couple of days after that swapped from relay operation to e-Bus, knowing it would be just as easy to swap back if it didn't work out.

While I don’t know about your system, We have an older Worcester Bosch boiler that doesn’t have OpenTherm even though our Drayton Wiser smart system supports it. We had a wireless simple thermostat which I disabled at the boiler end when I put the Wiser in.

The Wiser system has a totally standard mounting plate and it was as simple to install as taking the old controller (a simple timer control) off the wall, leaving the mounting plate behind and then clipping the Wiser to the mounting plate - job done!

Maybe check to see whether there is a standard controller somewhere with the standard plate on it - if there is, you should be able to connect any controller to it. Of course, if they havent included the OpenTherm connection on that mount, then you still won’t get the fine-grained modulation support.

In terms of whether such systems actually save money though - I would say that they do only sometimes. I have spoken to people in the Node-RED forums who have clearly saved money with a smart system. But I am fairly safe in saying that we do not. Bear in mind though that we live in a large, Victorian end-terrace with solid stone/rubble walls on 2 sides and solid brick on the other. And we are quite exposed, especially from Northerly weather but also from the SE. And we are in Sheffield in the North. So not ideal from an energy-saving perspective 

What you do gain though is better control and more comfort. So we don’t have to keep the house at the same balance of temperatures all the time and can adjust things better.

I suspect that what happened with us was that what we saved by using a smart system with lots of TRV’s, we lost by being more comfortable  . But also, with such a large thermal mass to heat, it is hard to guess at the background level of heat needed to maintain a base temperature - because it can take a couple of days to make the house comforable in the winter if the heating has been off for any time.

My previous research only turned up the Vaillant VR33 link module - but I never tried one..

Thanks eezytiger. We do have the vr65, with an ecotec plus 630 and vrt 360f, which is the wireless thermostat/timer. 

I had also read that the vr65 is compatible, but there is something I think about the most current Tado. To install and get it working I had to go through the app. But it flat refused to recognise our system. I emailed 2 different places at Tado. And as I said before, after multiple back and forths eventually both people at Tado admitted it won't connect to our system. I had asked for specific email instructions and they couldn't supply them.

Maybe that is only since 2020, but either way, after a week of trying to find a way round it, I admitted defeat and returned the Tado. 

Kim

Thanks for this, I was considering getting the Tado but there doesn’t seem to be any compatibility info so you can make an informed choice before buying the Tado. I’ve seen this issue highlighted on other forums outside OVO as well.

As we have a Vaillant (ECOTec plus 618 system boiler with VRT 392f wireless control with VR 65 control centre), I don’t think I’ll be getting a Tado when it doesn’t look like it’s ever going to work especially if I can’t get the compatibility confirmation before actually buying it.

The smart radiator thermostats look interesting as well but I’m not going to buy a smart thermostat that isn’t capable of maximising the efficient use of the boiler itself, which seems to be the case from this thread unless anybody can explain the situation in a way that I am not missing something!