On Saturday I went to a customers house to install a Ring Doorbell Pro and a Tado Thermostat. All went well, and after demonstrating the system working etc left the property with a smile on the customers face.
It wasn’t until later that evening (when I was over 70 miles from the area – it’s always the way) that I received a message saying “My wifi is broken, and it’s always been good. The only thing that’s changed is that the Ring and Tado have been installed”.
Initially I was like “OK, lets work through the wifi issues” (not calling the customer a liar, but expecting something much simpler to be the cause – loose connection when the customer moved the router to plug in the bridge or something).
Check internet – check wifi – are you actually connected?
Check all the cables are plugged into the router correctly – and then to the devices on the other end.
Is the ADSL / VDSL cable plugged into the back of the router – and the BT socket – (This is the most common issue when we move a router – the plug clips often end up broken before we go, so the cables can break and ever so slightly pull out of the port – loosing connection / providing a very poor connection.
Turn everything off. Router, and discs – check. Turn router on – and connect directly – Wifi but no internet. – Hmm. OK. Unplug the Tado! (The tado internet bridge is an ethernet connection – if either of the installs were possible to create an issue – this is the likely culprit).
Nothing. Still no internet… for about five minutes – then the customer says “ooooo its on!” “Oh. OK Plug the bridge back in!” “and there it’s gone again!” “OK Unplug it and turn on all your discs”. Check wifi speeds across the house – and it’s all ok! 50-60mb/s. Strange!!!
OK, So then we try plugging it into one of the discs. Success – partially. The rest of the network seems fine. The connections to this disc are lagged out down to 6mb/s. This obviously isn’t ideal.
So, we do some more investigations, and it turns out that there’s an issue with BT Smart Hubs and the Tado internet bridge auto negotiation. This is why the Disc that the tado is plugged into slowed down too, but then the rest of the network was fine!
The best way to fix this is to buy a managed switch, and set the port that the Tado is on to a 10/100 speed. Alternatively, you can buy a wifi repeater / ethernet connection to plug the tado into to move it away from the main wifi system (effectively giving an ethernet over wifi connection over the 2.4ghz connection).
The customer is monitoring the connection, and hopefully all is well. Searching the tado community makes it clear that this is a known issue. Why it isnt repaired / resolved already we do not know.
I will make this clear – I have installed hundreds of these thermostats, and this is the first time that I have personally came across this fault. My customers are aware that if there are any faults / issues they can contact me – as this customer did – and I won’t simply “fob them off” so I was shocked to learn about this. In future I will be noting this issue to customers, and definitely when I notice they have a BT Smart Hub.