Just wondering what the experience has been like so far? Just got an old style dial thermostat and tempted to change to something a bit more intelligent. Thanks.
Isn't nest USA only at the moment? 110v and all that...
Yes. I think it's actually the voltage used by the boiler that's different (24v maybe?) Also I think you can only set the location to be the US so it doesn't have the right timezone, or something like that. Though there are reports that people have got it working.
Tempted by a Tado but also tempted to hold out for the Nest. UK version due before end of 2013 apparently.
Edit: Ah apparently it's the aircon that works at different voltages. Some stuff about it [url= http://www.techradar.com/news/digital-home/nest-thermostat-coming-to-the-uk-this-year-1123751 ]here[/url].
I think an acquaintance in Canadia got a Leaf recently, I'll try and find out how he is getting on.
That Tado looks good though. The thing for me with the Leaf is (apart from it not being available in the UK) that it doesn't seem to have a wireless temperature sensor. Which is a bit useless for us because our thermostat is in the hall.
Tado is 250 quid though, which is quite pricey. I'd hope the nest is a bit cheaper seeing as it's $250 in the US.
Ok.
Have spoken to the chap in Canada with the Leaf. Says it works well, but placement is an issue since it sometimes thought they were out when they weren't. Looks good (he is an Apple stroker), easy to use and provides loads of reporting. Can't tell at the moment how much it is saving them money, as they have forced air heating and the furnace pretty much runs 24/7 in winter. Would recommend it though.
That aside, I have pulled the trigger on the Tado. Gone for the rental option, as £120 saving in the first year or 'no questions asked money back' is a bold claim - essentially 30% off our gas bill. So I anticipate it to be a free trial, and can then decide if I want to buy it outright.
Think I'm going for the Tado too. That is a pretty impressive claim.
Anyone tried the British Gas thing or the Owl ones?
torsoinalake, you heard from them yet? Put my order in on Wednesday last week and not a peep.
Last email said it would ship today:
Your order is being processed.
Due to the high demand we will need the coming weeks to ship your tado°. We work as fast as we can to process your order.
Planned shipping date: until 16.12.2013
Sounds good. I'll chase them up.
Did you request installation or you going to do it yourself?
DIY
Bugger... mine not shipping till the 13th of Jan 🙁
I ordered a Tado late November and was informed 16th December shipping. It eventually arrived 23rd December.
Self installation was ok even though our existing heating setup was a bit non conventional. Google is your friend for wiring diagrams etc.
So far it's been very good. It switches off when we leave the house and back on when we head home. The app and website are great, easy to use.
It switches on quite early in the morning to achieve the desired temperature at wake up time but I think this is because it's still "learning".
The house certainly seems warmer than it was, which was not the aim, but might suggest Tado controls the heating more accurately then our old thermostat. With the old controller it was always to hot, too cold or maybe somewhere inbetween,Tado seems more steady.
I've taken meter readings and I'm going to compare daily consumption with last Winter to see if the savings pan out, but I'm going to take additional readings from time to time and cut out the learning period to get a more representative measure once Tado knows how to heat our house.
Sounds good. I'd read in a review somewhere that it takes a while to settle down as it learns.
I went for the installation in the end as it was a free offer, but not heard anything about that. Should be trivial though as our installation is fairly new. May just do it myself if the box arrives and there's no news from an installer.
NEST just got bought for $3.2b by Google...
http://www.neowin.net/news/google-to-acquire-nest-labs-for-32-billion
A fair wedge of cash that.
Just got the tado here. Ended up doing the installation myself. The online instructions were actually very good and made it seem simple (which to be fair it was.)
Keep checking to see what it's doing. Set the temp and times, installed the apps, shall just let it do it's thing for a few days before I start fiddling 🙂
I might get a NEST next, but I only installed a Heatmiser controller just before xmas (even though I bought it a year ago). Have to say it's very nice being able to control the CH from an iPhone at home or out and about.....
[url= http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3681/11510402616_7b6700d584_z.jp g" target="_blank">
[url= http://www.flickr.com/photos/brf/11510402616/ ]Heatmiser Wifi Thermostat iPhone App[/url] by [url= http://www.flickr.com/people/brf/ ]brf[/url], on Flickr
Not as intelligent as NEST, but way better than a standard thermostat...
Have had attempted delivery of the Tado this week. Will pick it up tomorrow.
Did anyone else get a T-Shirt and chocolate Santa as compensation for late delivery?
We've just ordered a Tado - week 9 for delivery, they're busy it seems...
Did anyone else get a T-Shirt and chocolate Santa as compensation for late delivery?
WTF? No t-shirt or chocolate here despite having to wait about a month for delivery 🙁
Tado installed. Real easy, took about 30 minutes all said and done. There were only 3 wires to hook up in the thermostat though.
First impressions are that it is going to take a bit of tuning. It is now quite obvious how inefficient our central heating is, and how useless our old thermostat was, both in where it was located and temperature control.
Did you get chocolate?
Happy with ours so far. Boiler seemed to be on and off all the time before, seems less so now. Interestingly it decided to come on about 20 mins earlier today than it did yesterday, assuming because the house was colder and it was colder outside too. Quite clever.
Tado is 250 quid though, which is quite pricey. I'd hope the nest is a bit cheaper seeing as it's $250 in the US.
$250 = £250 usually, by the time VAT and various other taxes etc are added.
Chocolate and a T-Shirt for me.
The tado is £250, but I have just seen on their Twitter feed that if you convert from the rental option in the first 12 months, they will credit your rental payments to the purchase price.
Couple that with the money back guarantee if you rent, and you essentially have a 12 month trial either way.
Tado server outage...?
Well after a week or so of having the tado my confidence has been shaken somewhat. They made some DNS changes last night which meant their servers have been unavailable as the changes are propagated. So been out here for over 12 hours now.
Upshot is that tado doesn't get to know when people are home so doesn't turn the heating back on. There is a manual over-ride button that can turn it on though, and ours has been heating the place just fine, but judging by the feedback on twitter some people haven't been as lucky.
Bit of a dumb thing to do in the middle of winter to a device that controls your heating.
I fitted a manual override switch when I installed the Heatmiser, in case it got confused, so I have a simple way of switching the CH on and off......
So far I've not needed to use it yet!
Footflaps, a good idea that. I've still got the old mechanical thermostat, so if the worst does happen then it's a 5 min job to swap it over. Luckily the over-ride button on the tado seemed to work fine for me. Couldn't check the app or the web site though so had no idea what it was actually doing and was nervously watching the boiler to see if/when it came on!
It's the start of SKYNET! It's going to freeze/boil us in our houses!!!
Should I be expecting a visit from their T1000 maintenance engineer?
Is your name 'John Connor'?
Personally I'm not keen on any controller that needs central control eg what if your cable provides goes down for a few days etc..
Plus there's the whole Skynet concern.....
Yes, it is a bit of a failing. I believe they are addressing this to add control over your local LAN.
It does have an override button on the wall unit though. All I lost was the presence detection and the ability to configure and report usage. It's inconvenient but not disastrous.
The 'Beta' stickers all over the box it came in, and on their website means that we are Guinea pigs at the moment, so there may be the odd hiccup.
We just used the manual override and it's all back today.
Yes, not a big deal really. Though seeing as it was apparently planned work, some sort of prior notification would have been good (maybe a banner on mytado page.)
True.
I'm not sure the home button worked on my tado during the outage. Boiler certainly didn't come on (but orange light did), but not sure of the temperature though so it may be that it was ok. Seems like they dropped a b*llock with that one if it doesn't work which is a shame as otherwise it's been superb. House has a much more even temperature - rooms that were cold are now warm and we don't get the hot/cold fluctuations we used to. Had an issue with the temperature sensor and they just sent out a replacement set without quibble so they're definitely trying hard. Even if it saves me no money, it's worth it for a warm house and a happy wife 😉
Having been thinking about one of these for a few weeks our thermostat has suddenly packed up, so now with a replacement need rather than an upgrade I think we'll take the plunge.
However... Has anyone installed a tado (or any of the others) to replace a 2 wire stat? Ours was a battery powered timer/programmer stat hence it's effectively just a switch on the live.
May be worth asking Tado about it. There doesn't seem to be anywhere for a battery. You may be able to install it near the programmer and then just use the remote temperature sensor.
They were offering free installation too, may be worth checking that out.
I wondered how folk were getting on with these after a couple of months use? Pondering a purchase of one, we have no room thermostat at all at the moment. Not sure whether to go with Tado or wait and see if/when the Nest gets launched in this country.
Happy with the tado. Does what it's meant to do. They had one big outage near the beginning of the year I think but that all seems to be sorted now. Haven't done any sort of comparison of how much energy we're using though.
I got Tado a couple weeks ago but its not installed yet. I've been busy plus I'm having trouble finding the wireless receiver for my exisiting thermostat (which needs to be bridged for Tado to do its thing).
Alternatively, Nest UK is out! with free installation until next week.
Friend of mine just ordered a Nest. £230 though, that's a lot of gas savings?!
He might want to check he ordered the right thing as it's free fitting until the 8th so he should only have needed to pay £170!
Tado is working well - reminds me that I need to read the meter and see how we are doing compared to last year.
Still like the look of the Nest Thermostat though, especially that you can now place it where you like with the use of the stand.
Owners of the Nest Protect take note: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-26879987
The £230 is for faster installation:
The £230 is for faster installation:
True, in that case he should be more patient 😀
They look so toy! I like the look of them and, to be honest, would quite like one, but I think my wife would throw a fit if it meant she'd lose control of the heating.
Is there any impartial evidence of how much money they are likely to save?
Is there any impartial evidence of how much money they are likely to save?
Not necessarily impartial but Tado were offering a full refund if it didn't save you £120 a year, It's unlikely they'd do so without a lot of confidence in the money saving on offer. Given the technology in the two is very similar, I'd expect Nest to deliver similar.
Colleague has ordered his Nest (on the £180 offer) for install shortly. Am sorely tempted - our central heating is run off LPG*, and so anything to manage** its use is a great idea in my eyes.
*As someone on here once said, it'd be cheaper burning unicorns
**The stove is used A Lot, but I live with two [i]burds[/i], so apparently the house can never be too hot… 🙄
How's everyone getting on with Tado?
Finally got round to installing mine last week and it's been working well. I still think it's learning my schedule, but the way it turns off the heating when you leave it pretty good as my schedule can be sporadic sometimes. No more heating an empty flat every evening I'm out.
I am also interested in Nest users experience. thanks for any info
I had a nest installed the week they were released in the uk (cant remember when that was). It is a really good product. We needed a new thermostat and programmer anyway which with installation wasn't far off the introductory installed price of the nest (£170 ish) which does the same job. Its so easy to use and much easier than the outdated interfaces on most programmers. Set up was easy and never had any problems since. The app works well and makes setting up a heating schedule a doddle. We also like being able to turn the heating on remotely if heading home early or delaying it coming on if back late. The dumb system we had before meant that to have the house at a certain temperature at a specific time I would just guess and set it to come on around an hour before hand. The nest works out from outside temperature and saved history of how long the house takes to warm up and knows how long to put the heating on to get the house to the right temperature at the right time.
I will never know if it will save me any money as we only moved in to our current house last year and have also had cavity wall insulation done since last winter.
I would buy another without hesitation. Its a stunning looking piece of modern design that works very well.
+1 andysredmini
(though of course, because Google owns Nest, it now knows when I am and am not in my house.)
Nice to hear. Just bought a Nest this week and waiting for it to be installed.
I like my Nest. I installed it myself - I've not got a complex heating system and with a multimeter and some basic electrical knowledge it was fine.
The Nest seems to do everything I expected but as for savings - I'll need to wait for a couple of cooler months to find out.
Thanks - that's really helpful 🙂
I fitted a Tado for my mum back in May - it is working nicely and she is surprised at how little oil she has used. I fitted it myself after waiting in vain for Tado to get someone to fit it for me. Installation was easy and *very* well documented on the website.
Our experience are influenced by the fact that the previous thermostat had been knackered for I don't know how long and the house was getting left with the heating totally off when people were out and then heated to Death Valley levels when people came home. It is now pleasantly the right temperature whenever someone is home.
The best thing I think I can say about it is that you pretty much forget that it is there - it quietly does its thing without making any sort of a fuss or needing intervention by anyone, which was an important consideration for me as I am responsible for it and my mum is in another country.
I would definitely recommend one to other people.
+2 andysredmini
The savings I've had since fitting the Nest have been considerable. That said I don't doubt I could have got a chunk of those with any thermostat, as I had nothing before.
I fitted a nest myself recently and am really pleased with it. The AutoAway functionality has definitely saved us money, and the schedule it comes up with is very efficient.
I took a load of (albeit crappy) photos showing how I wired it up because it really isn't difficult you just need to take care. I'll try and post them up here - it may save a few others the £70 professional install fee.
Interested in anyone that DIYed their nest install (and experiences in general).
Just have a stock british gas timer at the moment, so upgrading to something that actually holds a temperature rather than just blasting the heating on could be good.
All the gadgety goodness is appealing too...
The best thing I think I can say about it is that you pretty much forget that it is there
Agree with cranberry re: Tado. It just works.
Fitted ours about 3 weeks ago, still in the novelty stage of checking the website, looking at the daily report. It maybe lets our house get a wee bit too cold if we're all quite far away for several hours, so it doesn't really have time to get completely up to temperature by the time we get back. I'm sure a phone call to Tado could correct this, but it's saving me money, and if it's a wee bit cold for 30 minutes to an hour as the house warms up after we get back, it's hardly the end of the world. Saving me more £ too.
hmmmm. Just noticed Tado do a rental option for £5 a month...
zigzag69, would changing the comfort settings slider attempt to fix this? If you moved it more to the comfort end it might be more aggressive in reaching the desired temperature.
Still not switched the CH on yet this year, been really mild in the SE.
In the first few weeks it'll need to learn what amount of heating your house takes in a given circumstance ( outside temp, weather, indoor temp ) to get the house up to the right temp when you return.
With my mum's place in summer it was initially doing the opposite - overheating the house because it was unsure of how sunlight would affect the heating of the home each morning.
It'll learn. 😉
Tado been working well here for about a year now (I got fed up waiting for the Nest last winter.) It started to turn the heating on again about a week ago. Does seem to do a good job of learning how quickly the house heats up and combining it with the forecast and it comes on at different times each morning. Someone's in pretty much all day at the moment so probably not saving us as much as it could do if we were in and out all the time.
zigzag69, if you turn the "comfort" setting up a bit it won't let it get as cold when you're out.
They did have a minor issue last winter when their servers become unavailable (DNS issue I think) and it resulted in not being able to turn on the heating! They've since changed the local implementation so this doesn't happen again.
zigzag69, if you turn the "comfort" setting up a bit it won't let it get as cold when you're out.
Aye, comfort settings already at max. The comfort slider could probably do with being a bit more granular actually, since there's only 3 settings - left, middle and right.
Fitted one of these at the weekend having heard about it on here. Was pretty easy to do though it would be nice if they sent you an overview of the instructions rather than you working through it bit by bit as you go.
I quite like it and was looking forward to setting it up over the next few days. Only trouble is it seems to be interfering with the internet somewhat as it's stopping my wife connecting via her laptop. She's already turned against it and unplugged the thing. Even if it means she'll get cold.
Anyone else had a similar issue?
Gaz
Probably worth a repost of this, regarding issues with Heatmiser Wifi thermostats when using port forwarding for remote access.
Vulnerability issues were posted on line and day after my heating came on at 35degs at 6am.
http://cybergibbons.com/security-2/heatmiser-wifi-thermostat-vulnerabilities/
Is NEST still offering free installation??
DrP
dont think so but its pish to install
Is pish good or bad??!
DrP
(Oh, like piece of pish...)
sorry, what I mean is....
terribly easy once you figure out the call for heat switch on your boiler. 🙂
Mine is a Worcester + Bosch and they'll tell you all day long that a nest isnt compatible. however, it was as simple removing a jumper and wiring the heatlink across that circuit (the box that sits next to the boiler and talks to the thermostat bit).
What boiler do you have?
PSA - Tado are doing a discount for Christmas - use the code "Christmas" and you'll get 15% off today. The percentage discount drops each day until 24th when it is reduced to 4% off.
How do these things work then?
Do they take an internet weather forecast and then hope its right for where you live? Do you need gps switched on, on your phone too, or can it just work off the 3g?
Our boiler directly takes the air temperature from outside the house, which determines how hard it works, which I am guessing is going to be way more accurate?
Plus our existing Honeywell CM927 wireless stat has a leading function, and this cost us loads more money when we tried it.
Genuinely trying to see what advantage these 2 systems could bring me apart from internet control?
Genuinely trying to see what advantage these 2 systems could bring me apart from internet control?
That's pretty much it. And a nice graph
just bumping this. Looking at getting it installed via npower. Working on the same usage rates as this year (only been in the house since feb) the tariff would cost me an extra 40 quid a year. However im thinking that with the nest we could potentially save this.
So worth it or not on an old fan boiler?
G
Genuinely trying to see what advantage these 2 systems could bring me apart from internet control?
The presence thing on the tado really is pretty good. Controls house temp relative to how far away from your house you are. Also does a good job of "learning" how quickly your house heats up and adjusts the times it comes on accordingly. You set it all up then pretty much forget about it. Which you don't really get with Internet control alone.
Having got a wood burner, we pretty much never use CH now, so the internet Thermostat is just switched off...