tado Smart thermostat V3+ review

Tado has been a name in the smart home heating space for sometime along with Nest and Hive, to name a couple. The smart heating setup from tado has gone through versions, with the latest being V3+. So in this tado smart thermostat V3+ review, I look at the new app, HomeKit, water control and smart radiator valves.

To fully test tado for this review, I opted for the smart thermostat, 6 smart radiator thermostats and an extension kit to control the hot water. The tado system has been up and running for 4 months now in my home and tested extensively.

Just be transparent, HomeKit Authority purchased the equipment, but with a 25% discount via tado. We also got the Auto-Assist feature enabled FOC for the review. But to be clear, tado has no control over the content, nor will the influence this review outcome. You can read more about the review promise and the ethics statement for more information.

Tado thermostat V3+ review in pictures

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Price, availability and overview

The Tado Smart Thermostat is only available in the UK and some European countries. In terms of price, it all depends on how you want to make your heating smart and I will take you through the options.

Tado offer two ways to get started with its smart heating product. The first being the smart thermostat starter kit and the second the smart radiator thermostat starter kit. Confused?, continue reading on.

Smart thermostat starter kit

Price: £199.99

In the smart thermostat starter kit you get a hub that is the bit that connects to the internet, but also connects all the devices together. You also get the smart thermostat that controls the central heating.

This is ideal if you live in small space or want to control the entire homes heating with one device to keep things simple. By going with this option you have control over the boiler and all the house.

Smart radiator thermostat starter kit

Price: £119.99

The smart radiator thermostat comes with the same hub to connect everything up. But instead of the smart thermostat that goes on the wall, you get a smart radiator thermostat that you replace your existing dumb radiator thermostat.

This option is great for renters that don’t have the option of changing out the entire system.

Whichever path you go down, you need a hub to make the tado system work. So it all depends on your home and choice which one you go with.

Once you have decided on which tado starter kit you opt for, the next thing to consider is the optional extras.

Smart thermostat

Price: £119.99

If you went with the smart radiator thermostat kit, then you may add a smart thermostat at a later date. This could be useful if you had the downstairs controlled by individual smart valves, but wanted to control the entire upstairs radiator with one device.

Smart radiator thermostat

Price: each from £69

If you went with the smart thermostat kit, then you may add a smart radiator thermostat at a later date. To get most out of the tado system, it’s advised to install them on every radiator in the home, but this could get expensive. You can buy them as a single (£69) or bundles of 2 (£129) and 4 (£229), which gives you some savings over the individual price.

It’s also worth noting that the smart radiator thermostats come in a vertical and horizontal fitting, make sure you buy the one that fits your radiator.

Extension kit

Price: £89.99

The Extension Kit enables you to control your hot water. You also need it to connect the tado Smart Thermostat to your heating system if there is no room thermostat or if you have a wireless room thermostat installed.

Subscription

The new V3+ version featured in this review has an optional subscription. For an extra fee, you buy a feature called Auto-Assist that will automatically turn down the heating if you leave the home or if it detects an open window.

The V3+ Auto-Assist fee is £2.99 a month, or £24.99 for a full year. With the monthly fee, you can activate it only in the winter months when your heating is most in use. If you don’t want to pay the monthly fee, the tado app will notify you and you can manually turn on away mode or open window mode. You can read more about the subscription here.

Tado thermostat V3+ review design

The central thermostat is a simple white square with a small button on the lower right which you used to wake it up and show you the current temperature.

To the left of the physical button you find a touchpad to raise and lower the temperature. You also get a back plate to mount the thermostat on the wall, but I leave it on a table in the games room.

The individual smart radiator valves are a premium alternative to the ‘dumb’ valves I previously had installed. A sleek cylinder with a little LCD screen that turns on when you interact with them, which displays their current or target temperature.

While you will use the app to control the radiator valves in the main, you can manual turn the heating up and down. When you do, it’s got a clicky feedback when you turn the crown of the radiator valve. The LCD display will show you what temperature you’re setting the room to.

The extension kit is also simple in design and blends in with the home. You need to install this in the place of the existing programmer, so because it’s wider than most, make sure you have enough room.

The hub, oh the hub. Normally with smart home products you get a fairly chunky hub, but tado has designed the hub to look like a use data dongle. Its slick, the status lights are simple to understand and easy to hide near the router.

Tado thermostat V3+ install

While you can pay tado to install the kit for you, which starts at £50 depending on your options. I installed it myself as I am fairly competent, however if you are uncertain, then pay for a pro to install it for you.

Just a quick reminder, for the install and the rest of the review, this is the setup I am working with

Smart thermostat

tado hub

extension kit

6 smart radiator thermostats

V3+ of the app along with auto assist activated

Apple HomeKit

My current home heating was Hive, and this didn’t feature an existing wired thermostat. So getting setup, I needed the Extension Box to get my boiler talking to the thermostat.

First thing you need to do is to disconnect the existing heating controls, but make sure you turn the power off.

The next step is to install the extension kit, if you have an existing programmer attached to your boiler to control hot water, the Extension Kit can replace it. The Extension Box fits the UK standard backplate, so it’s easy to replace the programmer with no rewiring.

In addition, there’s a Tado Gateway that connects to your router or home network, via Ethernet cable. You also need a spare power source to provide power to the hub.

The next step is to place the Smart Thermostat in the room it will control, I placed it in my games room as it does not have compatible radiators. It is also battery powered so doesn’t need a power connection, which is useful.

App setup

Once you have got all that connected, you then need to follow the install process within the app. While the process itself only took about 5 minutes, it was a little disjointed, let me explain.

When setting up the smart thermostat in the app, you are almost immediately asked to open a webpage on your computer. Not only that, it’s not even a hyperlink, you have to manually type this into a browser? Really? However, once you have overcome this hurdle, the rest of the setup is simple.

I also connected tado to HomeKit for Siri voice control. I did this via scanning the barcode on the hub and then following the setup process within the Home App on your iOS device. If you plan to use HomeKit with tado, then I advise you set this up before you continue. This way the tado app will get access to all your existing rooms you have set up in HomeKit, meaning you don’t have to mess around creating them in the app.

Moving onto the smart radiator thermostats and again these are simple to install and setup. You simply remove the existing TRV from your radiators and then pop these on. Setting them up in the app is a breeze as unlike the smart thermostat, all the setup is within the app and done via a barcode. Once you have scanned this barcode, you add them to the room.

Once you’re all set up, you’ll then see individual rooms in the app with various readings. That’s it, in terms of install and setup, other than the odd quirk its straightforward.

Tado thermostat V3+ app and features

The app has received a major overhaul in the V3+ upgrade, but some once free features now cost. But despite these complaints, in the V3+ app you get a cleaner home screen.

The App displays each room by its own tile, along with various features like hot water, Air comfort, geo-fencing and energy savings reports. So Let’s dig into each one and find out how they work.

Room tile

The room tile comes complete with the current room temperature and the set temperature. That makes it far easier to get a view of what’s going on at a glance.

If you click on the tile, it gives you some advanced options to manual change the heating, edit smart schedules, reports and the humidity reading.

Starting with smart schedules, I set up a schedule that turns the heating up, for a few hours in the morning and evenings during the week in the upstairs bedrooms. For the downstairs rooms, particularly the open-plan kitchen/living room I set a different schedule that reflected me working from home in these rooms.

Annoyingly, you can’t copy schedules between days or between rooms, so getting everything working can be fiddly. But once its all set up, its like having your heating on auto-pilot.

If you want to change the temperature manually in each room, you tap the room tile and can change it by using the sliding scale. Once you’ve set a temperature, tapping outside of the control bar, takes you back to the original screen. This is where you can set how long the temperature change should last for from five minutes up to permanent.

If you have over one radiator thermostat in a room as I do in the kitchen/living room, the temperatures apply to all devices in that room, no matter which of the devices you have changed.

You also can look at reports within the room tile, which gives you historic room temperatures along with humidity. While you can view past days, it would be great to see months or even year charts.

Hot water Controls

As with the temperature controls, you can also set up a schedule that turns the hot water on and off. If you want change the hot water manually then tap the hot water tile and select on or off

Just like setting a temperature, tapping outside of the control bar, takes you back to the original screen. This is where you can set how long you want the hot water to heat, ranging from five minutes up to permanent.

While there is nothing ground breaking in this feature, it was great I could fire up the water heater from the bath to give me more hot water during a long soak.

You can also set the hot water to off when no-one is at home. While this would be useful for holidays, it does not work so well if everyone is out and want to come home to hot water. So in my case I turned this feature off as I didn’t find it very useful.

Geo fencing

By default, the Tado app now warns you when you leave your home, asking you to turn your heating down or off. However, as I was using Auto-Assist, this feature is automated. So your heating will turn down when everyone goes out. But be warned you need everyone that lives in the house to download the tado app and connected to the account. It would be good if tado could release some motion detection to get around this.

You can also change the geo-fence of your home location, I found this particularly useful for my partner as she works locally and reducing the home radius.

As I was using the Auto-Assist feature all this works in the background, so it first I was not sure if it was working. But after a few times of checking it was all good, so I just forgot about it.

Open window detection

The radiator thermostats detects that a window is open by detecting a drop in temperature. Then based on the preferences, it then turns off the heating in that room. Window detection is configurable on a per-room basis, both as a toggle switch to turn the feature on or off, and a setting to choose how long it lasts for.

While I had huge success with the geo-fencing, the open window detection feature was disappointing. As you can see with the screenshot below, the app is saying that I didn’t have a window open for 24 hours. This is despite having the bedroom window open since I woke and the kitchen bi-fold doors wide open.

However, despite the air quality report showing me I had opened no windows for 24 hours. The energy report for the month of may showed it had turned my heating off 32 times because of an open window detection.

Air comfort

The V3+ app also introduces Air Comfort, and this provides an indication of the quality of air in your home. The app takes readings from your Tado devices and gives you feedback on your room quality.

Using the indicator in the circle, your aim is to get the right combination of humidity and warmth. Should your indicator move out of ideal temperature, you’ll receive warnings, and advice such as “Take care as hotter rooms can cause rough and itchy skin”

While this information is “useful” it would be great if the app would send a notification based on a room’s air quality, so you can act on it. I found that visiting the app it would give me information, however its information I already knew based on the room conditions.

Auto-assist

Oh, the controversial Auto-Assist feature which was introduced with the V3+ of the app. It costs £2.99 a month which can be cancelled anytime.

Simply explained, Auto-Assist automates the Geo fencing and Open-Window-Detection and automatically turns down the heating. If you don’t have it, then you get a push notification prompting you to change the heating settings.

While I got this service for free, I found it useful for the away mode. But because the open window detection didn’t work for, then I don’t think I would pay for it in the summer and only pay for it in the winter months.

Energy savings

The energy savings tile gives you insight on a monthly basis of how much you have saved. It also gives you an overall percentage saved per feature.

This tile is useful to see how your usage changes over time and on different months, but again it would be good to a comparison between months without switching between screens.

Tado thermostat V3+ value

A smart heating system can have a ton of features that keep you interested. But the real test is how much energy it saves you and how a smart device improves your life.

By using the Tado system, I found that we saved on an average of 30% from March 2019 to July 2019. So how does that turn in pounds value? Well, it’s hard to tell because I have changed suppliers compared to the same period last year. But taking into account the price difference, I think am better off with tado.

However, this information comes with some significant caveats, and your experience will vary a great deal depending on the layout of your home and the amount of smart thermostats you have in the setup. As to get the best out tado, you really need it in every room, but this will make things expensive.

Tado do offer a 12 month money-back guarantee, which means if you don’t think you have saved money, well you get a refund after returning the kit.

The biggest question is can you save enough money with tado and get a return on investment. The simple answer is no, not in the short term anyway, its is likely to be year 4. Before I will see the investment being paid back in my home.

Smart Home and voice assistants

Tado is one of the better connected smart thermostats with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant and Apple HomeKit support. As HomeKit is my default smart home platform, I only reviewed tado with the Apple setup.

Control from the Apple Home app allows you to change temperatures for your devices. However, the most useful is the using HomeKit automations with the Tado system in Automations. For instance, you can turn your heating on and lights down to watch movies.

You can also use Siri and ask “what is the temperature in the bedroom.” Even better when I was driving back from the airport, I could ask Siri to “turn the heating to 25”.

However, I used the Home app about 30% of the time and the remaining 70% I used the tado app. While the Home app is useful if you are heavy HomeKit useful and want automation. It does not offer anywhere near the same level of control as the tado app.

I was also disappointed to find that the humidity sensor in the thermostats are not exposed to HomeKit. I was hoping to use these to trigger a dehumidifier connected to a HomeKit smart plug, but I could not.

Tado thermostat V3+ review conclusion

Being a Hive user for nearly 4 years it took a few days to get used to how tado worked. The biggest change and once I got used to, it was being able to control each room individually. This meant I was not wasting energy in rooms that didn’t need warming in my home.

Liked

Using tado’s smart schedules and controls has given me some savings, but without compromising on comfort keeping things warm. The Geo fencing featured worked well with Auto-Assist and would turn things off when the house was empty.

While tado does not have the same design appeal as Nest, it’s still a nice design. But, the smart radiator thermostats are the nicest looking on the market in my opinion.

Integration with third-party services such as HomeKit, Alexa and Google Assistant is great as it gives users choice.

Not so great

The open window detection being the biggest letdown for me. While the reports said it had worked during months, the air comfort reports didn’t show windows open for long periods.

While the app and software is good, tado could deliver more with the air comfort and reporting. It would be great to see the app give more insight and trends and push data to the user.

While HomeKit integration is good, and I got it integrated with my senses and automations. I would have liked to have been able to use the humidity sensor.

tado Smart thermostat V3+ review verdict

Tado ticks a lot of boxes for me and it all the various components link nicely together. Yes, it has its shortcomings, but most of these are software which can be fixed via firmware updates. The Auto-Assist feature is expensive, but you can turn it off and on when required.

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