Zone heating: Tado (+homekit) vs Honeywell

Hardware
1

I’ll hope i get slammed with people with experience in one or another but i couldn’t find an exact answer on Google so here goes;

What i want to achieve:

  • Zone heating in my entire house, i have floor heating downstairs.
  • Open window functionality (i already have this setup for my shutters)
  • Revert temperature that was set manually either immediately (kids playing with it) or after ‘x’ hours.
  • Any automation i add should complement, not take over the system.
  • Something that works locally, without any form of subscriptions, since i am sure i can add that and more functionality myself.

Both Tado and Honeywell tick all these boxes (with more or less budget).

  • For Honeywell you would need the nanoCUL with firmware to be able to control it locally; otherwise you are dependent on the Honeywell Cloud API and face delays.
  • For Tado you would depend on homekit to be able to control it locally; otherwise you are dependent on the Tado cloud.

I think it boils down to the ‘learn’ factor of the thermostats. For example my open questions are:

  1. Can you assign (for both products) a radiator knob which is in a different room to the main controller which is in another room? This would apply to my floor heating which is under the stairs, which i want to control using the ‘main controller’ which sits in the living room.
  2. I have read that the Tado takes outside temperature into account to determine heating needs. Is my assumption correct that i then don’t need an outside temperature sensor on my boiler?
  3. How is the self-learning from Tado compared to the self-learning from Honeywell (if anybody can answer this at all)

One more question i have for the TADO users; if you have this connected via homekit, and you change a radiator valve manually, are you able to detect this (i assume a state changed event is fired from home assistant) and that you also should be able to revert it immediately, right?

2

Gilles, did you ever get a reply?

I have 12 Tado’s in my house, and these work well connected to the Tado cloud. However, I also want to be independent of the Tado cloud services and the dependency on internet access.

I tried installing Homekit Controller for both the Tado’s TRVs and Tuya lights and switches. This seemed to work well, except that I still had to have the Tado and Tuya integrations installed, otherwise the devices would not be discovered. However this meant that I had 2 of every device and entity.

The bigger issue was that whenever I rebooted HA I got yet another copy of the devices and entities.

I’d be very interested in hearing about your progress and conclusions.

3

@MilesAheadToo i didn’t setup TADO yet (bought it but lying on my desk ever since). I do have the answer to question 1: “Yes, you can have a knob in a different room (physically) but in the TADO app assign it in the same room”.

So i have yet to connect everything in Home assistant, but i am not going to do that via the cloud, i am hoping to do everything with Homekit. I’ll keep this thread updated once i have some time.