When the Internet of Things doesn't play nice, who can help? Tado Home Heating?

I’ve got an ongoing problem with the tado bridge not appearing to obtain an IP address from a BT Home Hub 5 or the BT Home Hub 2.

The reason I choose to go with tado over, Hive or Nest is the cross platform control - iPhone, Android and Windows Phone.

On a Home Hub 5 with the Home Hub reset to factory new we see the following:




Showing the laptop called SCRATCH plugged into LAN1 and something plugged into LAN4 (that something is the tado bridge).
The DHCP table does not show the tado:





But the event log does have mention of it:


So it appears that all of my other devices (Xbox One, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii, Sky TV, Surface Pro 2, Surface Pro 3, iPhone 5s, Windows Phone 1020, Dell Latitude D630, Home built PC) all connect quite happily onto the Home Hub 5 and can route to the internet.

But not the tado bridge.

As I have an old Home Hub 2 (HH2) I thought I would try that to see if the tado bridge could get a DHCP lease.

The Home Hub 2 cannot go onto my home broadband (I have fibre instead of DSL so the modem in the HH2 is not compatible) as such I rigged up a simple network of the HH2 with two Ethernet connections: 1 – tado, 2 – laptop (called “SCRATCH”)

In the HH2 control panel (which is quite basic) all I can see is the following:


This shows that the tado bridge has not connected. Looking in the DHCP table on the HH2 we see this:

(the event log has nothing for DHCP)

Short story long: the tado has not attempted to or got an IP address on either of the Home Hubs.

So far tado support have said that it must be my router as I took the bridge to work and it did get an IP address on a different model of router (NetGear). I agree with them, it is a problem on the BT Home Hub 5 (and maybe HH2 as well) connecting to the tado bridge. But as all these other devices connect correctly to the Home Hubs I believe that the problem must lie within the implementation of the IP stack on the tado.

I would like to work with tado to get this fault resolved. Looking at the above errors it seems to be that either the tado bridge in general (all of them) or my specific one does not like the BT Home Hub series of routers (as a final test I took the tado bridge to my fathers house who also has a Home Hub 5 and it also could not get an IP address there).

Ideally I would like some way of setting a static IP on the tado, that would take DHCP out of the equation, if that is not possible maybe a way to have the tado log so that we could see what the tado is attempting to do (but as there does not appear to be an interface on the tado to look at I don’t know how this would be possible).

If tado can’t work with me to resolve I’ll have to take advantage of their no quibble 30 day money back guarantee and be left with old heating controls…… 

8 comments:

  1. I'm having almost the same problem with exactly the same HH5 hardware. In my case the hub appears in the table correctly labelled but connection drops after a few hours. Things are restored with a bridge power off and restart but this only lasts so long. Installed last night and all was well but 5 bridge restarts since then. Would be interested to know where the integration issue is - I suspect it is the DHCP IP allocation.
    Keen to know how this goes or its money back guarantee time here too.

    Jez

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    1. Tado have said that they have purchased a HH5 to test against. I would think we will see a new firmware for the Tado to get around the issue. My money back guarantee has been extended so they seem committed to fixing the problem. Nice to know I'm not alone.

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  2. I have same issue! Tado came today was so excited! However bridge will not connect! Hope they sort it! I have emailed them also before I saw this saying I think the bridge is faulty!

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    1. I eventually (after going through loads of troubleshooting) got a replacement bridge that worked straight away. I would contact tado (support@tado.com) and reference this post as I know I've ruffled a few feathers :-)

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  3. So it seems like they have sold and sent me a faulty product! I have emailed them and no one has bother to help me! When I get home tonight I shall uninstall and send back for a full refund! Shame as I did not want to use Nest

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    1. Sorry for the delay in a reply Marty, was sorted by tado sending me a replacement bridge. Hope you got it sorted.

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  4. the new bridge have sync issue which tado is aware about in one year now (2017-2018), in my case I connected the device to the Cisco managed switch and the sync is only 10mb/s however if the switch has been rebooted the todo bridge do not reconnect.
    I returned to the old bridge which do sync at 100mb/s and I must say is stable !!

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    1. Shame that it still appears to be an issue, mine was back in 2015! The replacement bridge worked for me, support was good if you contact them.

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