Price: £199
Rating: 8

Tado had a lead on the popular Nest thermostat, launching several months earlier in the UK, and is betting that its eponymous remote-control smart thermostat will take off in the UK as it has in its native Germany, where it is the market leader. Read our Tado thermostat review.

Tado has since updated its thermostat to show off the room temerature (see above), as this aspect of the Nest display was liked by customers. The new Tado box features a touch LED display for enhanced use outside of the app and desktop controls.

Unlike the Nest, the Tado has a more subtle, minimalist look, so shouldn't stand out in most domestic settings – unless you have black walls, of course.

It's secret weapon and the bit that outs the "smart" in smart thermostat is the way that it links with your smartphone's GPS. Tado knows when you and your fellow residents are at home or how far away, and can dial down or turn up your heating based on this information, so you're not heating an empty house. As you get closer to home it recognises this, and starts heating the home ready for your return.

Tado claims that its smart thermostat will help consumers save an average 27 percent in heating costs – about £180 per year. At a cost of £199 (self-install) Tado should have paid for itself within a year or so. (If you get an engineer to install Tado then the cost rises to £258, so would take 18 months to recoup using Tado's figures.) While the price of energy has fallen in the past few months, cutting energy costs as soon as possible makes a lot of sense. See also: Best smart thermostats 2014: Hive vs Nest vs Tado vs Heat Genius.

We have run the Tado for 8 months, and our energy costs have dropped, although it's impossible to pin this all on that Tado, although just having such a device does make the householder more keen to save heating and other energy costs around the home.

Using such a system is a revelation in monitoring and controlling your domestic heating, and we're confident that savings are there to be made. The more control you have the more money you’ll save, and with sky-high energy prices right now you'd be silly to ignore all solutions. (See also: Heat Genius review.)

Why buy a smart thermostat?

What’s the most expensive bit of tech kit in your house? HD TV? Super-slim laptop? Apple iMac? iPhone? Audio system? In most houses one of the priciest chunks of tech is the humble but expensive boiler. A new, energy-efficient boiler will likely set you back £1,200-£2,500 including installation – that’s more than most smart TVs or laptops.

The real cost of a boiler is much higher, as an inefficient one will be costing you hundreds of pounds a year in wasted energy. One option, especially if your boiler is over 15 years old, is to replace with a new energy-efficient model. The average savings when replacing a “G” rated boiler is £225 per year. If your existing boiler has a more efficient rating of “D” you can still expect to save as much as £65 per year by replacing it. Even considering the cost of a new combi boiler purchase and installation you’ll be saving money in the long run – maybe as early as 5-7 years.

Based on a saving of 25 percent gas usage, the Energy Saving Trust estimates the average saving per household on energy bills after installing a new boiler to be £310. And if your current heating system doesn’t include a room thermostat the potential savings in using a smart system such as Tado are even greater.

If your boiler isn't that old and is still going strong, a cheaper way to make your boiler more efficient is to get smarter. There is a growing list of smart thermostats and systems appearing on the market, all of which promise to slash your heating bills.

The most well known is Nest, from the ex-Apple guys who originally worked on the iPod. It looks gorgeous, and is simple to use. Google liked it so much that it forked out $3 billion to buy the company. Since October 2011 Nest claims its US customers have saved more than 1.4 billion kilowatt hours, enough electricity to power more than 135,000 homes for a year. It made its UK debut in April 2014. Read our Nest review.

The US Environmental Protection Agency claims consumers could reduce energy usage by 10-30 percent using the schedules and temperature settings of programmable (semi-smart) thermostats. These let you program temperatures for certain times of the day – so you can automatically lower the temperature when you'll be out of the house, for example.

Unfortunately up till recently these programmable thermostats have been tricky for the average homeowner to operate correctly. The new, smart remote-control thermostats, such as Nest and Tado, connect to home Wi-Fi networks and come with simple smartphone apps.

Tado vs Nest: features

What differentiates Tado from Nest is its smarter learning features. Nest programs itself by learning your behaviour patterns and desired temperatures for certain days and times during the week – which it calls Nest Sense. It then builds a schedule for your heating system to follow. You control Nest through the outer-ring dial to adjust temperatures, and then via the mobile app.

The brains at Tado believe that the smartphone will become the remote control for everything inside the home. In this way Tado is more revolutionary than Nest. Tado doesn’t feature a physical dial for you to adjust your home’s temperature, which at first feels weird. Mostly, everything is controlled via your smartphone app (iPhone, Android and Windows Phone) or the desktop Web app. It creates a more real-time and less static schedule than Nest’s. The new Tado box does allow you to turn the temperature up via the touch display on the sensor.

Since Tado uses your location to determine whether or not the heating should be on, you don't need a set a schedule. Nor do you need to worry when your schedule changes unexpectedly: Tado will make sure the house isn't heated unnecessarily and that it's always warming up before you get home.

This is one reason to opt for Tado over Nest. Nest doesn't use geolocation at all, and only basic sensing to work out if you've left the house while the heating is still on.

We're not the biggest fans of Nest's automatic schedule as it's slow to respond when you change your daily routine. This simply isn't an issue for Tado.

It also takes too long in our opinion to activate the Nest's Auto Away mode. If you've set the heating to come on at 5pm but you decide to go out for the evening, it could heat for two hours before activating Auto Away at 7pm.

You set Tado the target temperature you want your home – or rather the room in which you place the Tado thermostat – to reach. This should be placed in the room you and your family spend most of the time in. The Tado Smart Thermostat is powered by three AAA batteries. Tado claims that these batteries typically last for two years, and will inform you via email and/or push notification when it is time to replace them.

As there’s only one sensor – Tado may add more sensors in the future to add zoning – we think Tado is best suited to smaller homes (1-4 bedrooms).

You also set the usual times you wake up in the morning and go to bed at night – which can differ for weekends. Tado then knows to heat up the house ready for when you bound (or crawl) out of bed in the morning. If you think the heating comes on too soon it’s easy to adjust Tado’s settings via the apps. You get to the settings with a simple swipe of the mobile app screen.

You can set a minimum Sleep temperature of 10°C, which is a change from the previous 15° following user requests. There’s also a maximum of 25°, so if you like your house really hot then Tado might not be for you – but then you probably don’t care much about energy efficiency…

All this smartness takes a bit of getting accustomed to. In the UK we’re used to setting our boilers to come on and off using timers. Creatures of habit we get up at the same times on weekdays and mostly pretty regularly on weekends, too. If we get cold we walk to the boiler and turn up the temperature.

With Tado you leave the heating on all the time (initially scary for energy-efficiency nuts), and the smart thermostat does all the thinking for you.

Here's the really clever bit. It even knows whether you are at home or elsewhere, so if you do break out of your usual routine – either staying at home for the day when you’d usually be out, or being away when you’d normally be in – Tado is watching you and turning the heating up or down depending on your location – using the GPS or other location functions in your smartphone, and other smartphones assigned to the home.

The Tado app uses the most battery-efficient way to determine how far you are from home (for example, with iOS geofencing/region monitoring) and works in the background. GPS is only called upon in exceptional cases. This takes place fully automatically.

If you have deactivated the GPS function, Tado uses the other geolocation functions of your smartphone. In general Tado always uses the last distance from home that has been transmitted by your phone. This information is used to determine the level of heating. In case your phone does not send any location data anymore (e.g. when deactivating all geolocation functions), Tado will use the distance of the phone that was last transmitted.

While Nest creates an “Auto-away mode” based on what it's learned it doesn’t actually know who is actually in your house. It guesses, based on a combination of sensors and algorithms, when you're away to prevent heating or cooling an empty home. When it thinks you’re back the Nest Thermostat returns to your regular schedule.

Via the GPS/geofencing in your smartphone Tado uses Presence Detection to actually know when you’re at home or away. Indeed it controls the heating depending on how far away you are – so it knows to start heating up the house as you get nearer.

If you pop to the shops for an hour it will gently lower the temperature to save money but raise it again as you approach home. If you’re out all day on a trip, Tado will lower the heating further and for longer, but knows when to raise it again when you’re on your way home.

Depending on how far the residents are away from home Tado lowers the temperature. As soon as one resident approaches home Tado heats your home up. We would prefer for Tado to allow the user to determine the distance from the home, as this is important if one resident works close to home.

If you have a guest or a babysitter who remains in the house while you’re away you can switch Tado to Manual mode. If you want to you can set a temperature manually at any time. This way you can remotely control your heating.

Would all residents who might stay in the house unaccompanied have a smartphone? It’s likely they would as most children who are old enough not to be babysat have smartphones these days. Tado is compatible with iOS (iPhone and iPad), Android and Windows Phone.

With the free Tado app installed on all residents’ phones Tado can run your heating to an optimum point.

Another smart thermostat is Hive – available for £199 for customers of British Gas only. Like Nest this doesn’t offer actual presence detection, and is actually a little less smart than Nest as you have to adjust room temperature as you leave the house.

Tado expects in the future to enhance the system software with an Expert mode for even finer user controls. Until then you can contact the company if you, say, wanted to extend or reduce the area of presence detection so that the heating would be lowered closer or further from home.

Tado is a clever little thing. It learns about the performance of your heating and how it works together with your house or apartment. The company claims that within three weeks Tado should be operating at maximum efficiency. Tado examines your daily temperature data to work out how fast (or slow) you house warms up, for instance.

In the first few days Tado might behave a little erratically as it tests and gets to know your heating system and your home.

Tado also uses a range of local weather data to know when to raise or lower the heating to your desired level of comfort – as the solar radiation of the Sun affects room temperature. The timing of sunlight shows up on the informative screen you get when you turn the app into landscape mode.

The Tado app is clear and simple but full of information. The background colour changes depending on the mode Tado is in. Orange denotes Tado is in Home mode – when one of the residents is home. Green is away mode – when the last person has left the house. And Blue shows Tado is in Sleep mode – when your sleep time begins.

There is also a Tado Web App that you can access with a web browser on a PC, Mac or laptop. On the Web app there’s an overview of all of Tado's activities: a detailed report with a temperature curve, heating activity and events that influence the temperature regulation. Additionally you can adjust all settings, set a schedule for residents without a smartphone, and manage your account.

There are three different heating operations, set either on the phone app or on the Tado thermostat itself.

Off: When set to Off, Tado only heats when the room temperature drops below 5°C to avoid frost damage.

Auto: When set to Auto, Tado controls your heating based on your location and schedule. You can adjust your preferred home and sleep temperatures. The optimal away temperature is set by Tado automatically.

Manual: When set to Manual, Tado keeps the room temperature at the selected set point.

What happens if you leave your smartphone at work and nobody else is home? On the firsgeberation Tado there was a button on the Tado box that let you or an unattended guest tell the Tado that someone is actually home. This mode was deactivated by pressing the button again, or in the Web app to tell Tado to go back to the programmed heating schedule.

In the second-gen Tado the unattended guest can interact using the LED matrix display’s user interface on the thermostat. Of course, as a generous host you can also warm the house up for him or her with your mobile app or over your computer.

If you turn off your heating in the Settings then it stays completely turned off except for warm water. Because Tado tracks the room temperature it will nevertheless turn on the heating once the room temperature falls below 5°C – a great safety, fall-back feature to prevent any frost damage.

Pet owners who leave their animal unattended for most of the day will want to consider the best temperature for their pet. A dog doesn't need a room temperature of 23°. And Tado doesn't let your home cool down completely when nobody is at home.

NEXT PAGE: Tado compatible boilers, self installation or engineer advice, and price options

Tado's minimal looks belie some sophisticated technology, but much of the installation is good old-fashioned rewiring.

Once you decided whether to buy one of the new smart thermostats you need to decide how competent a DIYer you are. If your talents end with changing a fuse and rewiring a plug we recommend you pay the extra £50 to get an engineer to do everything for you.

That £50 is probably a wise investment for most home users, especially if you don't already have a room thermostat. Tado itself "strong recommends" an engineer installation.

Tado thermostat: installation

Clear and concise online instructions guide you through the multi-part installation process.

If you have a wired thermostat you simply replace your old thermostat with the £199 Tado Smart Thermostat. Any type of thermostat can be replaced, whether digital, analogue or relay controlled.

If you don’t have a wired thermostat you will need the £79 Tado Extension Kit to connect to your heating; you also need the Smart Thermostat.

The Tado Smart Thermostat controls the heating when wired to the heating system. The Extension Kit controls the heating based on sensor data from the Tado Smart Thermostat. The Tado acts as a sensor and remote control when installed in combination with the Extension Box.

You place the Smart Thermostat in the living room – it's battery powered so doesn't need a power connection– and the Extension Box connected to your boiler via cable and placed next to it. The two devices connect wirelessly.

The Extension Kit consists of the Extension Box, the cable to connect it to the boiler and plugs for different boilers.

If you have a programmer attached to your boiler to control hot water production, the Extension Kit can replace it. The Extension Box fits the UK standard backplate, so it's easy to replace the programmer without any rewiring.

That said, we were mighty glad we had the installer there to do it all for us.

In addition there's a Tado Gateway that connects to your router or home network, via Ethernet cable. We found placing the Gateway near to the Tado box helped connectivity, and for that we set up a simple Powerline home network. See Best Powwerline adapters.

The final part of the Tado installation is connecting the dongle-like Tado gateway to the internet by plugging it into your broadband router.

Tado claims that installing the system is “easy to do in just a few simple steps”. We’re less sure of that, especially if you don't have an existing room thermostat on the wall.

We’ve talked to a few heating engineers and they all recommended an expert install any of these smart heating systems. Of course they would say that, wouldn't they, but I had an engineer install mine and I’m glad that I did as there were parts of the job that would have had me concerned. If you’re a very competent DIYer this may well be within your skillset. I’m man enough to admit that it would have worried me on more than one of the above actions. See below for what needed doing to wire the Tado box to the electrics inside my boiler.

Note though that my house didn’t have an existing room thermostat so the boiler needed more wiring – to take over the boiler’s clock timer – than it would have done if it did.

In most of the heating setups in the UK the thermostat can be replaced by the Tado box, which is far less complicated. If you have a wireless thermostat or no room thermostat the box has to be connected directly to the boiler, as above.

I've heard of plenty of people who have installed the Tado on their own with ease, so it all depends on your level of electrical and boiler-rewiring DIY confidence, and your current setup. Warning: some room stats have permanent live voltage – if you’re not sure if yours does, again I’d recommend spending the £50 on the engineer’s visit.

To be fair to Tado this is not unique to its system. A Nest engineer also warned us against self-install, and Nest itself "highly recommends" a full professional installation.

There are three installation options: either you self install following Tado’s very straight-forward step-by-step instructions; you self-install with the help of a Tado representative over the phone; or you get an engineer round to do it all for you.

Once installed, however, using the apps to control Tado settings and times is pretty simple.

Tado thermostat: price

The Tado system costs £199 (plus £9.80 shipping), including VAT. Installation by a qualified engineer costs an extra £50, raising the total price to £258.80 if you don’t want to install the system yourself.

Tado looks a little pricey compared to the glossier Nest Learning Thermostat, which costs from £179 for the self-install version and £249 including installation, although Nest strongly recommends the more expensive professional install.

If you’re skeptical there is another rental option. There’s a monthly fee – charged annually in one amount – of £4.99 (12 months x £4.99 = £59.88).

Households that don’t have an existing room thermostat can use the Extension Kit to set up a wireless connection to their heating system. The Extension Kit is available as an accessory to buy for £79 or rent for £2.99 a month.

Don't forget that the whole point of a smart thermostat is to save money long term. Tado should start saving you money within a few days, and should pay for itself within two years.

Tado thermostat: compatible boilers

Tado says that the system is compatible with boilers from the major manufacturers, including Vaillant, Worcester, Honetwell, Potterton, British Gas, Ariston, Buderus, Siemens, Wolf, Junkers, Drayton, Ideal, Danfoss, Baxi, Glow-worm, and more.

Tado Care

Update: Tado has announced a new service called Tado Care, designed to prevent heating system breakdowns and offering immediate help in case of malfunctions.

As part of the new service a remote and free of charge boiler check is offered to all Tado customers every year in late summer. This check runs in the background and Tado sends a push notification via its app to assure that everything is working properly before the colder winter season starts.

A digital interface enables Tado Care to detect errors and maintenance requirements well in advance. It monitors the performance of the heating system and sends the user a message if action is required.

For example, if the water pressure is too low Tado will inform the customer in the mobile app news feed and will suggest self-help actions or connect him or her directly to an engineer if required. Tado is partnering with large installer networks such as HomeServe plc to offer immediate on the ground support.

Buying Advice

Although time will tell how much energy/money Tado has saved me it’s clear that having control over a house’s heating determined by who is in the house and who isn’t makes a lot of sense. Tado is the best smart thermostat at this as its presence detection simply follows you and your smartphone via GPS, and turns the heating up or down as you get further away or nearer home. Most of us just set the timer and only go back to the boiler to flick it on or off when we get too hot or cold. Being able to control this (wherever you are) via an app on your phone is a much more intelligent way to control your heating and energy costs. The initial cost isn’t cheap, but there is a money-back monthly payment option, and you should start saving on your heating bills within a few days.