So gotta ask for a friend looking for a Hot Water and Central Heating management solution
- TADO
- Honeywell
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I have no experience with Honeywell, but with Tado and it does a good job.
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I’ve been looking at this too, though I’ve not purchased yet. However, I would go for neither of these, and offer a couple of other suggestions that are particularly good for people in the UK.
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Drayton Wiser – good price point and function, plus very easy to fit into standard central heating systems (in the UK at least). The biggest con for me is that the radiator valves use Zigbee to connect. If you have tried using Zigbee devices, you will know that the range is not great, so you need Zigbee extenders (probably lots of them) to get whole house coverage. As the Drayton system is proprietary, you require their own smart plug / extender that you will need to put just about everywhere (and make sure that guests/children do not unplug/switch off). However, if you have a small house then the Drayton system is well established and worth considering.
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Wunda Smart – very new, so not much information available. However, I believe that it offers some very significant advantages (on paper at least). First and foremost, the connection between hub and radiators/thermostats is a low energy proprietary wireless one that is claimed to cover huge distances and never need any extenders. For my requirements, this makes it win hands down over the Drayton. It allows up to 30 separate heating zones (= rooms) and can control up to 4 separate zone valves (none of the others can do this, so if you had [say] upstairs zone, downstairs zone, underfloor zone and hot water then it could do that). Like the Drayton, it is also easy to fit to standard UK central heating control wiring. WundaSmart Home Heating Controls – WundaSmart Home Heating Controls | WundaGroup
If you have a large property, then consider the following drawbacks of the TADO and Honeywell Evohome systems:
- The TADO (which uses 6LoWPAN connectivity) also has frequently reported range issues connecting to distant radiators
- Honeywell evohome uses a proprietary RF protocol that seems to have fewer range problems. However, although it is more expensive, it is limited to 12 zones unless you want to buy two separate systems and join them together. It does come with a pretty (but expensive) colour controller though!
The only drawback of the Wunda Smart system that I can see is that they don’t support IFTTT (and I have been in touch with their tech support about this–they really do not want to go down that route 
), though they do support Alexa (and if you try hard enough, you can get IFTTT to pass commands to Alexa [as I currently do with my Nests], which would get around that).
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Thanks so much for the advice Robin, that’s amazingly helpful!
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Agree that range can be an issue for the Tado system, as the devices do not work as range extenders.
I hope that they could actually upgrade to Thread with a software update. They use the same frequency and 6LoWPAN already.
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I have the Tado Smart Thermostat which controls the boiler based on the living room temperature (and family presence, weather forecast, etc.) and one Tado Smart Radiator Thermostat for a specific room where I want to control temperature more precisely.
It works great although, as it has been said, range can be an issue sometimes. The Smart Radiator Thermostat loses connection very frequently, but regains it automatically, like in this example (a very bad day, most days disconnections only last a few mins)
I wrote a few articles on Tado (in Spanish though):
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Which is why, if the Wunda Smart system works as advertised, it would be hugely advantageous. The house I want to put this in has horrible problems getting WiFi coverage to all rooms, though I have solved this with LOTS of meshed repeaters. The last thing I want to do is try to replicate this but with ZIgbee repeaters :).
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Ugh, I have so many issues with my Google mesh. They say V1 and V2 play together nicely but the performance is actually terrible.