I have a bunch of Tado smart thermostats and wireless temperature sensors throughout my home. I used the Tado app to setup all the thermostats, and did not add them to the Home app. I exclusively used the Tado app for everything. I set up schedules for each room and I pay for the Auto-Assist feature, purely for the geofencing, costing me 30 euros a year.
I’ve now bought a Home Assistant Green with the Zigbee adapter. I already added all my Philips Hue lights directly to Home Assistant, and from there exposed them to Apple’s Home app via the HomeKit Bridge integration. This all works great! I was able to get rid of my Philips Hue bridge and the Hue app, I don’t need this at all any more. And since I own a HomePod mini which acts as the Home hub, I can still control all my lights while I am away from home. (I also use Siri to control the lights.)
However, I don’t really know what to do about my Tado setup. I’d like to setup all scheduling within Home Assistant, and I’d also love to get rid of the that 30 euros a year cost by doing the geofencing within Home Assistant, but it all seems quite hard.
This is what I tried so far:
First I added the Tado Internet Bridge as a HomeKit Device, but this resulted in a huge amount of sensors and temperature controls being added to my dashboard. My living room with 4 thermostats can’t be controlled as one unit, but I have to set the temperature on all 4 thermostats. This seems very weird to me.
I then removed the Tado Internet Bridge from HA and instead setup the official Tado integration, by entering my Tado username and password. This resulted in a single thermostat for each room being added, which makes a lot more sense to me. Via the HomeKit Bridge I also see the thermostats in the Home app, which I never had before.
I then setup a schedule using the Schedule Helper, where I added additional data to each time block in the form of temp: 17. I created an automation that uses the schedule as a trigger, and uses that temp value to set the temperature to all my climate controls. But… the Tado app still has its own Smart Schedule, and seems to overwrite what Home Assistant does. I cannot remove or disable the Smart Schedule within the Tado app. I don’t know how to create a schedule in HA without the Tado Smart Schedule getting in the way?
Then there’s the question of geofencing. How can I make sure that the heating turns off when I leave my house, and resumes its schedule when I am back home?
I also want to be able to remotely pre-heat my home while I am away. Like, an hour before I get home I might want to be able to turn the heating back on. In the Tado app I can simply change the geofencing mode from Auto to Home. Is something like this easily doable without relying on the Tado app and the paid geofencing feature?
So, in other words: can I do schedules and home/away mode, while also controlling the temperature when I am not at home, from within HA, and without the 30 euros a year cost? And without having to use Home Assistant Cloud which costs 75 euros a year? Like, let’s say that HA can change the home/away setting of my thermostats based on my location. Great, but how would I be able to manually override that when I am not at home and I don’t use Home Assistant Cloud?
Like I said previously, I do have a HomePod mini which acts as the Home hub, so via HomeKit I can remotely control things. But while I can control the temperature of my thermostats, I don’t see any home/away setting for my thermostats. Maybe I could make a fake light switch which acts as a home/away mode, which could be controlled by HA and my device’s location, while also making it possible to manually change this setting from the Home app? No idea if this makes sense.
Or am I stuck with the Tado app and the 30 euros a year cost, if I want the scheduling, the home/away feature, and the ability to overwrite this while I am away from home?
As you can see, a whole bunch of questions coming from someone with no HA experience. Is there a good writeup somewhere on how to achieve all these goals?