Did you get anywhere with your quest?
I took the plunge and bought a Tado during Amazon Prime day(s) plus three radiator thermostats. My reasons for going Tado were...
- I wanted geofencing. I was finding that there were good chunks of time - with my old thermostat - where we’d be out but the heating was on. This was mainly at weekends but occasionally during the week as well. So the standard schedule programming wasn’t giving me enough flexibility.
- I was finding that upstairs was getting uncomfortably warm during the winter. This was purely down to the thermostat being downstairs so that where the demand for heat was coming from. This is where the radiator thermostats come in. The bedrooms. Are set to be at 18C and based on the graphs that are generated, the demand for heat has been near zero since I turned the system on a few weeks ago.
At the moment I have the house split into four zones. Master bedroom, bedroom2, bedroom 3 and ‘the rest of the house’ (everything else). My plan is to add three more radiator thermostats. One for the living room, one for the dining room and one for the kitchen. I’m holding off doing that at the moment though because the layout of the house will be changing soon. We’ll be adding a wall between the living room and dining room, then much later the wall between kitchen and diner will come down. So the way the house heats will change.
Flaws with the system? Umm. I wish it had a boost function. There has been one or two times I just wanted a blast of heat but you have to then manually takeover the system and then return it to automated after. I guess another ‘flaw’ is that if there is a demand for heat in a bedroom, the radiators in ‘the rest of the house’ also come on. That’s just down to the fact my radiators are all on the same ‘circuit’ with the heat being demanded locally. With that said, if it’s cold upstairs it’ll probably be cold downstairs, so having them on isn’t a problem to me.
The heating has only been turned back on in our house for the past two weeks however I have been impressed thus far. The real test will be at year end during winter but early indications are good. Using the history graphs you can already see the system is learning when to turn the heating off so it doesn't overshoot. The claim is that Tado will save you its purchase price within a year. Whether it’ll be that good I don’t know but based on the short slice of evidence thus far I’m confident it’ll make some savings.
