While many people start out with a digital voice assistant and some smart lightbulbs, or possibly a doorbell camera, in their journey to a truly connected home, upgrading your heating system with a smart thermostat is a bigger step along the road.
No one really knows how boiler controls work, and the wall-mounted analogue dials from the 1980s that still control many of our heating systems are severely outdated. Lucky, then, that adding a digital thermostat and taking full control of your heating system to improve efficiency, save money and only have it running when you need it to is a quick and easy process thanks to tado°.
tado°’s latest Wireless Smart Thermostat X is a truly smart upgrade for your heating. Installing one saves users 22% energy on average, which will certainly make itself known as your bill goes down. It is also compatible with most heating systems thanks to using the OpenTherm and Relay control systems. It can also be used with all major smart home systems including Google Home and Amazon Alexa, and is Matter and Thread-enabled to help all your smart devices work together. This technology is achieved by having devices communicate locally without sending data to the cloud for every exchange of information, ensuring continuity of service even if an internet outage forces them offline.
It’s easy to install – a DIY approach is possible, as all the parts you need are included, but isn’t a big job for a professional either – and once it’s working you’ll need to get set up in the tado° app, which is the control hub for the whole tado° X system.
Hot technology
The Wireless Smart Thermostat is the beginning of your tado° smart home, but far from the end. You can install the Smart Radiator Thermostat X on any or all of your radiators for individual control over a room’s temperature. Also engineered in Germany, the Smart Radiator Thermostat comes with a set of six adapters to fit almost all radiators, and has a removable battery pack that can be recharged over USB-C. Installation takes less than five minutes, and the tado° app will guide you through every step of the process.
Once it’s up and running, you can control each room’s temperature from the tado° app, whether you are at home, work, or on holiday. Its Quick Actions let you switch everything off at once or boost warmth instantly, and as it runs natively with Google Home, Alexa, Apple Home and SmartThings, you can control your radiators with your voice as well. With just two clicks in the app, you can create personalised heating schedules for each room, according to your daily routines, or even switch the heating off completely when you go on holiday. Stored on the device, the offline schedule even works without an internet connection.
If you want to boost your heating efficiency and save even more CO2 every year, a subscription to tado° AI Assist opens up smart automations and dashboards. For just £3.99 a month or £29.99 a year, the Adaptive Heating system can learn your room characteristics and your usage patterns, enable geofencing to ensure you never heat an empty home, preheat the system before you arrive, and even detect open windows to prevent you heating up the sky.
AI Assist offers Energy IQ and smart reports, so you can get real-time insights into fuel consumption and cost, as well as fault detection to help fix heating issues before they escalate. With AI Assist, you can save as much as 55% more energy than the free tado° app.
