A great app, powerful geolocation feature and future expansion capabilities make this a great choice

Pros

• Excellent app
• Easy expansion
• Strong location detection

Cons

• Comparatively expensive

The Tado Smart Thermostat is a system that has evolved and grown since it first launched. It now offers a huge degree of flexibility, even extending into smart radiator controls, so you can expand the system to give room-by-room control.

At its most basic, you need the Smart Thermostat Start Kit, which consists of the Smart Thermostat and the USB-powered Internet Bridge that connects via Ethernet to your router to give you app and voice assistant control. With the v3 Bridge, you also get HomeKit support for Siri integration.

If you have a wired room thermostat already, this is the only kit that you need; if you had a wireless thermostat or you didn’t have one before, you’ll need to buy the Extension Kit, which connects to your boiler to control your heating. You also need the Extension Kit if you want to control your hot water.

An £80 extra, the Extension Kit pushes up the price of the Tado system, making it quite expensive. Other systems ship with the boiler connector as part of the kit. Typically, every other company negates the need for a separate internet bridge, too.

Tado Smart Thermostat review: Display

Don’t let the price put you off, though, as Tado makes one of the best smart heating systems. Its kit is also great looking. We love the way that the LED display shines through the plastic covering of the thermostat.

While you can pay a professional to install it, Tado can provide you with detailed instructions based on your boiler and current heating system. We’ve self-installed, and the instructions customised to our boiler made it very simple.

Tado is built around its powerful geolocation system, which turns off the heating in your home when you go out, and turns it back on as you start to return home. Tado supports multiple users, so the heat will never go out when one person leaves the house.

New to the current version of the software is the ability to set the geolocation radius; it’s helpful if you often pop out locally, as you can shrink the radius to make sure that the heat goes off when you pop around the corner.

When the heating’s on, Tado operates in a simple scheduled mode, where you set the temperature you want for the time periods you want. It’s easy to configure, and you can have the same schedule for every day, different for weekdays and weekends, or different for every day. Annoyingly, you can’t copy schedules between days, so you have to set each one manually.

From the app you can override the current temperature to give it a boost, setting the change to be permanent, to last until the next switch point, or to run on a timer. The thermostat lets you adjust the temperature, while the app lets you set how long this lasts for.

Tado Smart Thermostat review: Expansion

With the Smart Radiator Thermostats, you get room-by-room control by replacing your existing TRVs. Tado’s controls are easy to fit and look fantastic. Neatly, the display is hidden until it lights up through the soft white plastic when you interact with the Radiator Thermostats.

Multiple thermostats can be placed in one room and controlled together; you can add thermostats to the same room as the main thermostat and use the larger device for temperature monitoring.

Smart Radiator Thermostats let you set schedules by room, giving you a huge amount of flexibility in how your house is warmed up. You may want some rarely used rooms to be kept cooler, the bedroom to heat up in the morning and the lounge in the evening, for example. This level of control will see you make the biggest fuel savings.

It’s a shame that you can’t copy schedules from room to room, however, and configuration has to be done manually.

You can switch between heating zones in the app by swiping on the home screen. You can override each zone’s current temperature either from here or by twiddling the dial on the Radiator Thermostat. This makes controlling the temperature in each room easy and flexible; if you walk into a cold room, you can quickly turn up the heat in that room only.

Tapping the menu button gives you an overview of every room, but the layout’s not quite as clean or as obvious as in the Honeywell Evohome app, which was built from the start to support multiroom. With the v3 Bridge, Tado supports Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa and Siri, with each one letting you set the temperature in specific zones. We found that all of the skills worked well.

There’s a full IFTTT channel, including triggers that use Tado’s excellent location detection. You can use this to turn off all your lights and other devices when you leave home, for example.

Tado Smart Thermostat review: Verdict

Tado may be comparatively expensive, but its excellent app, powerful location detection and ability to expand into room-by-room heating later make it a winner. Evohome is arguably more powerful for those that want multiroom today and it has dedicated quick actions for multiple rooms, but Tado is a great starting point for those that want to expand in the future.

Source: expertreviews.co.uk