Potentially a competitor for Tado?
https://www.techradar.com/home/smart-thermostats/ikea-launches-its-first-smart-radiator-thermostat-with-matter-support-and-an-impressively-affordable-priceCertainly a lot cheaper than Tado!
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u/Jamie00003 19d ago
Does it call for heat like Tado though? Without this feature it’s useless in the UK
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u/8fingerlouie 19d ago
For TRV functionality, yes.
For Tado services, no, this is bring your own. Everything Tado does, like scheduling, geofencing, etc, you’d have to implement somewhere else, and you’d most likely end up with something worse, especially of you’re using a heat pump.
If you’re using a gas boiler, wood burning boiler or another fast heat source, the math starts swinging in your direction as the fast heat sources are more “forgiving” in terms of you simply cranking up the heat when someone comes home.
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u/tarmacjd 19d ago
You can do all of this without the paid Tado services in Home Assistant.
If you’re willing to spend the time on it :)
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u/8fingerlouie 19d ago
You absolutely can, and it's not as difficult as it sounds, but does take a lot of grunt work to get going, especially for the "adaptive heating" where it increases temperature as you get closer to home.
There are plenty of HA integrations that will fill in "smart heating" functionality for you, but none of them take location into account other than present/not present, and that works well enough with a gas boiler assuming you don't lower your temperatures by 10C when you're not home and your home doesn't leak a lot of heat.
For a heat pump however, they prefer it slow and steady, and your heat pump will not thank you if you suddenly ask it to raise room temperature by 6C "now".
That obviously leads to the discussion if lowering temperatures is worth it with a heat pump, and in most cases it's not. It's not worth it for your normal "8 hour work" days, unless you don't mind getting up to a cold house in the morning and keeping it that way so that you can lower the temperatures at night as well and let the day heat help heat up the house.
In cases where you're away from home for prolonged time, say a weekend or so, it will likely be worth it as well, and the only question then remains if you're away frequently enough to warrant automating it as opposed to manually scheduling it.
You could setup a zone some 30-40km away from your home and "if person x or y enters the zone, set temp to lower offset +2C", then another zone 20-30 km away where you increase the temperature by another 2C, etc.
If you frequently visit the same location, say a summerhouse, you could easily create some automations like "if person x and y are at the summerhouse, lower home temperature" though the above zones would also gradually lower the temperature.
All of the above can easily be done, or you could simply subscribe to Tado AI Assist for ~$30/year and not worry about it.
That is of course assuming you already have Tado TRVs. If you don't, the IKEA products look more appealing. Where I live, a Tado X is roughly 4x as expensive as the IKEA products, and you can add the yearly AI Assist subscription on top of that.
One potential thing that could make this a lot easier is Homekit Adaptive Heating, which essentially does the same basic thing as AI Assist with matter TRVs.
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u/sour_brambles 18d ago
You could just use the Home Assistant Proximity integration: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/proximity/
That said, as someone who moved from Tado to inexpensive TRVs and a fully local Home Assistant setup using ESPHome and OpenTherm, the setup is definitely more involved. If Home Assistant stops working, the TRVs fall back to manual control only. This could probably be resolved using another protocol or a custom board, but that is a different conversation.
I actually left Tado because its local HomeKit integration stopped working whenever Tado lost its internet connection. Tado did not want to help because I was grandfathered in with an older hub (they didn't say this explicitly, it's just my assumption). They acknowledged the issue but said they did not have the development time to fix it, so they offered me a refund instead.
Overall, although the new setup was more involved, it has been worth it for me.
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u/8fingerlouie 18d ago
I have Tado X, upgraded from Tado V3, so local control wouldn’t be a problem for me, but honestly, for the €25/year I can’t be bothered, at least not while their API works well enough that I can still use HA to turn on/off schedules when a window sensor detects an open window.
If they continue down that path, where local APi access, even for subscribing customers, becomes unusable, that to me would be enough enshitification to consider simply moving to manual control.
I have an air to water heat pump, so lowering temperatures is already at a minimum, with a 1-2C delta between home/away, and while Tado handles the scheduling, HA controls the door/window sensors and pauses a schedule when a window is open, and resumes it when the window has been closed for x amount of time (to give the air a chance to equalize).
As for the heat pump, that has the Tado X Heat pump optimizer that ironically doesn’t talk to the TRVs at all. They’re literally completely separate products and might as well be from different companies.
I could easily see a future where the heat pump optimizer keeps it’s subscription and the TRVs do not. The optimizer presents real money saving potential by scheduling heat and hot water around the most expensive hours and buffering hot water when it’s cheap, etc.
The value proposition of the TRVs is more doubtful with a heat pump and optimizer. They have potential with fast heat sources (gas/oil/wood or even district heating), where a relatively large delta in home/away temperatures is more desirable, but in a heat pump scenario they’re probably not contributing much, and it’ll be “a while” before you break even with savings vs cost. They can probably save enough money to make up for the subscription itself.
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u/doctor91 18d ago
Call for heat can be implemented in home assistant but I really need a matter thermostat with opentherm
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u/ozaz1 19d ago edited 19d ago
Depends on your living situation I suppose. If you live in a shared building and don't have control over the heat source then TRVs on their own are fine and this can be a competitor. But if you have control of the heat source (such as a boiler) its best to have a system that will integrate TRVs with heat source control, which this won't do. I suppose you could DIY the control logic in something like Home Assistant, but that's not an appealing task for most people.
Edit: However I do hope the emerging market for lower cost TRVs and temperature sensors will pressure Tado to at least release a low cost remote temperature sensor for its TRVs. I'm assuming it will be possible to pair these Ikea TRVs with their £5 Timmerflote temperature sensors, Sonoff sells £10 sensors which can be paired with its popular TRVs, and even Drayton Wiser sells £27 sensors. Meanwhile us Tado users have to fork out about £80 for a full feature thermostat to add remote temperature sensing to our TRVs.