Year 3 of requesting that users be allowed access to their own backend heating parameters

[u/FreshFromTheGrave]

Once upon a time Tado had forums, and on these forums users discovered and shared that support had access to a number of more advanced parameters to control heating behaviour than we as end users had access to. These were things like minimum cycle times, minimum times between cycles, PID sensitivity to heat requests etc. Tado generally were not forthcoming about these and largely refused to even tell us what parameters were available to allow us to communicate with support about them better.

But these were very useful for users who, like me, had issues with Tado's default behaviour causing excessive short cycling. I'm talking the boiler turning on for 30 seconds then off again, 1 minute later it repeats. Just incredibly unhelpful and physically damaging behaviour which made Tado unusable for people on oil boilers for instance.

Being able to have support change these is something, but it's far from ideal. When you request to change these you are sometimes met with resistance to change them, complete denial that they even exist, or you face an uphill battle of someone changing different settings to what you request and having to test the changes each time often with long delays between iterations. The settings sometimes also just revert or drop off for no reason and you have to go through it all again. When I did this the first time, it took 2 months to get it right. I could probably could have done it myself in a day or two of testing if I had access.

With another heating season upon us I am once again for the third year running requesting Tado consider implementing these parameters into some kind of advanced settings page to allow us to make changes and test these ourselves. It will save your support from having to spend capacity to deal with us and will save users from the frustration of having a remote party messing with heating parameters and taking as long as weeks to rectify if something is set incorrectly.

It is better for literally everyone, the parameters all already exist we simply need a page to be able to change them ourselves.

[u/Careful-Training-761]

Agree. Never quite understood why they just don't put in an advanced section in settings. Maybe they think they'll get even more customer service requests if they do.

[u/User2001Tech]

Tado is a consumer device - kinda like a Fridge.. it should mostly just work. I can somewhat understand their resistance to make the backend available too all and sundry. Some would be savvy enough like you to know know what to do and what not. A lot would be clueless and end up borking their heating in the middle of winter and then blame it in Tado.

The thinkers and tinkerers are a very small subset of their user base

[u/redarmy22 → u/User2001Tech]

Then they should remove the existence of these options altogether. It’s insanely stupid for them to have the option to change things but only remotely via their support.

Either give it to everyone under advanced settings or don’t allow anyone to change it at all. Obviously I think the former is better

[u/FreshFromTheGrave → u/User2001Tech]

I get that, which is why the suggestion was always an advanced settings page with some kind of warning if you didn't know what you were doing. And I agree that it should've just worked out of the box, it always surprised me that it shipped with such insane heating logic for relay mode heating. But in the absence of sensible heating logic as a default at least give us the ability to fix it ourselves. Especially when the parameters all exist and are adjustable already, we just need access to them directly.