Nest Learning thermostat with smart TRVs e.g. Tado

Yella Fella

Yella Fella

Yella Fella

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Location
Milton Keynes, UK
Has anyone have tried this? It's super annoying that Nest has never released in room functionality other than the temp sensor for the US market only.

I know Nest recommend full-on TRV's in all rooms. However in order to save money and time, I'm happy with a smart TRV just to have rooms on or off pending on our home working schedule.

At the moment I switch all radiators off and only turn on the ones for the office and then off when I finish work and turn others on such as the living room.

I think I'll probably change to a full Tado system but need to readup how easy it is to convert. The Bosch smart TRV's look super cool as well. Shame ecobee also doesn't have in-room smart TRV functionality.

On top of this, is making sure it works across the board such as using Matter as I have a mixed predominantly Google home, but all devices are on Apple but I barely use homekit until now. I have 2 Alexa speakers just in case...
 
fish said:
Home assistant, I have 10 zigbee trv’s with 2 nests in out house and use home assistant for overall control
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Which TRV's are you using to go alongside Nest?

I've not opted for the Starling hub just for the thermostat so will look to change from Nest in the future but not right now. Happy for some smart TRV's to control 3 radiators based on the schedule throughout the day.
 
Stu999 said:
Did you fit it yourself or get professionals to do it?
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Did it myself.
Have an old tank system.
Y-plan?

Had a control unit near boiler that looked like this.


hDT34fD.jpg

And one of these in the hall

VP8FVQs.jpg


Ancient and yellowing!

I had to remove the analogue dial and bridge the wires (ie permanent on)

Then follow the tado wiring instructions to change the digital thing for the tado hot water control.
A fair few wires.

But works great now

(The garage is not 22..i just have that sensor indoors at moment :D )
8zdlOBMl.jpg
 
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Yella Fella said:
Happy for some smart TRV's to control 3 radiators based on the schedule throughout the day.
Click to expand...
The problem I've found is that you need smart TRVs to turn OFF the things you don't need and save energy - rather than the opposite idea of "put smart TRVs in the rooms you want to come on especially". It feels backwards to me and also means I'd need quite a lot of TRVs rather than cherry picking rooms.

fish said:
Tuya rad valves for me but I already had the nest stats. If starting again I would look at an integrated system like tado
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Can I ask why? As I've been sitting on a plan to get Tuya/generic ones and integrate into Home Assistant myself, but keep delaying as it's still not cheap.
 
Purely convenience, it just means the trvs can call the heating without any programming from me. Although if you pick the right Tuya units you can also have an external temperature sensor for calibrations and offset as the trvs read different to the room air temp away from them. Some of the tado units have issues with this due to how/where we mound rad valves vs our European cousins.

Edit: it depends how involved you would like to be
 
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413x said:
Did it myself.
Have an old tank system.
Y-plan?

Had a control unit near boiler that looked like this.


hDT34fD.jpg

And one of these in the hall

VP8FVQs.jpg


Ancient and yellowing!

I had to remove the analogue dial and bridge the wires (ie permanent on)

Then follow the tado wiring instructions to change the digital thing for the tado hot water control.
A fair few wires.

But works great now

(The garage is not 22..i just have that sensor indoors at moment :D )
8zdlOBMl.jpg
Click to expand...

Snap I've got the same and replaced the same system too.

Overall tado system works fine and fairly easy to use once it's set up. It's a bit less intuitive than hive but has had some quality of life improvenents whilst I've had it (eg copy paste schedules when you have 10 Trvs!)
 
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Tado user here in a small 2 bedroom flat, and at my mums 3 bedroom house. The latter has about 6 TRVs and the setup in both homes has been flawless for years.

I tried the subscription service but couldn't get the pricing per unit feature to work properly as I was hoping to monitor day to day running costs of gas use.
 
Buffman said:
Snap I've got the same and replaced the same system too.

Overall tado system works fine and fairly easy to use once it's set up. It's a bit less intuitive than hive but has had some quality of life improvenents whilst I've had it (eg copy paste schedules when you have 10 Trvs!)
Click to expand...
It took quite a few months of fiddling with schedules to get it working how I liked.
 
I've also just installed a Tado smart setup and it's ok, compared to the Wiser system it's more complicated and does things in a different way, obviously.

What I miss over the Wiser is that when you override the settings, and manually set a time period for the heating to be on, is that when the time period is over it returns back to the schedule, but, for me, it should return to the pervious setting you had it had it at. Thus if the schedules were off then that's where it should be. Also the Tado interface for this is clunky with a slider bar to set the time period. It means you can set a finer timing, however with the Wiser system it just involved clicking on a button, for the time period you require, and then after the time period is over it'll either return to off of to the schedule, depending upon what you've set the room too.
Also, when you have no internet the schedules do not operate as they are stored in the cloud, not locally, thus you'll wake up to a cold house, as we did yesterday. Then you have to individually turn on either the SVR's or the wireless/wired temperature in each room to have heat, or another setting to have the hot water heated.
The wiser system had two override buttons on the hub, one that manually turned on the hot water, obviously redundant if you have a no hot water tank, and another that boosted all heating for two hours. In my mind that was fool proof and I think the Tado way will be too complicated for some.
I've also had the SRV's in my lounge turning off at a far lower temperature that the target room temp, which means either setting the target temperature higher, you can only go to a maximum of 25c, or set the offset to compensate.
To get around that I've purchased another wireless temperature sensor, to work with the SRV's in that room, as we are in there the most, and set it as the zone controller. meaning it manages the temperature in the room, not the SRV's.
 
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Word of warning - if considering a switch to a heat pump in the near future this might not be worth it.

I’ve had smart TRVs since moving into my house a few years ago. Fast forward to this year and I put a heat pump in and now I essentially treat them as dumb TRVs. The heat pump is too powerful to be heating a handful of radiators which leads to it stopping/starting (which is inefficient compared to some impressive efficiency if it can keep going). I basically put the whole house on/off. I imagine I could do upstairs/downstairs but not yet tried this.

I know they say to keep your heat pump running 24/7 but it’s not yet cold enough - no one wants a house heated 24/7 when it’s still 10-15C outside. My heat pump doesn’t modulate down far enough to produce such little heat output. I’m in year one, month one really given the heating has only just come on for the year so my opinion may be swayed when it gets colder!
 
Coran said:
Word of warning - if considering a switch to a heat pump in the near future this might not be worth it.

I’ve had smart TRVs since moving into my house a few years ago. Fast forward to this year and I put a heat pump in and now I essentially treat them as dumb TRVs. The heat pump is too powerful to be heating a handful of radiators which leads to it stopping/starting (which is inefficient compared to some impressive efficiency if it can keep going). I basically put the whole house on/off. I imagine I could do upstairs/downstairs but not yet tried this.

I know they say to keep your heat pump running 24/7 but it’s not yet cold enough - no one wants a house heated 24/7 when it’s still 10-15C outside. My heat pump doesn’t modulate down far enough to produce such little heat output. I’m in year one, month one really given the heating has only just come on for the year so my opinion may be swayed when it gets colder!
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How is that even remotely efficient then.
It's always going to be better to heat only the space you need when you need it.
If you can't have it heating only one room then surely it's the wrong size heatpump.

My Evohome is still performing perfectly it's just about started coming on with the coldest mornings. But mostly I'll wake up and the rooms will be a degree below but it knows they'll warm up with the sun so stays off which is a great feature.
 
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I’ve just moved from Nest to a Tado setup with smart TRVs on all rads which can call for heat independently. This works really well for us where we have a log burner in our main living space so quite often only want to heat the bedroom/bathroom in the evenings. My guess at this stage is our heating/gas usage will actually go up but it will be used far more effectively to make our house comfortable. There has to be a trade off between cost and comfort.

I didn’t see how the Nest fit in to a smart TRV setup so I’ve removed it.
 
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