tado° announces three new products a IFA 2023: lo Smart Heat Pump Control, which allows you to control the heat pumps for home heating; the app Balance to better manage it with flexible rates; and the Smart Charging Appwhich allows you to recharge your car intelligently.
All novelties which, in our country, will not have had a revolutionary impact, due to the single or at most double time band tariffs. But they indicate a change of direction: tado° wants to create an open ecosystem for the energy management of the whole house – including car charging.
tado° Smart Heat Pump Control and other innovations announced at IFA 2023
Bill increases, sustainability, energy efficiency. Doing your part for the environment also becomes a way to save money, especially by finding technologies that allow you to save money by intelligently heating or cooling your home. But also by consuming green resources to recharge the electric car. Indeed, home and car heating have the greatest impact on the carbon footprint. Tado° offers solutions for intelligent home heating since 2011, but with the announcements of IFA 2023 he wants to make a leap in quality. Energy efficiency all round.
CEO and founder Christian Deilmann explains that every year the company saves on average 22% on bills for each customer, with its over 3 million smart thermostats. Which save the emission 1 million tons of gas.
But he explains: “in addition to reducing the energy consumed, with today’s innovations we also reduce the cost per kWh, further reducing the total cost for customers”. Indeed, he explains that if for the first time, last year, as Europe we produced more with renewable energy than with fossil fuels or nuclear power. A positive fact for the environment but which increases price volatility with flexible changing tariffs, which change every hour. But using the intelligence of tado° products, you can gain from the situation. This is one of the reasons why tado° acquired aWATTara company that sells energy on the Austrian and German markets with flexible hourly rates.
tado° Smart Heat Pump Control
The CEO then passes the floor to Dominik Busching, Head of Product Management, who explains how the diffusion of renewable energy is contributing to the increasingly frequent use of heat pumps for heating, instead of gas. The energy (and environmental) benefits have increased the number of installations by +26% on average, so that they could reach one million by 2030. However, many people are sceptical, because they think that not enough savings are still being made.
Then the company introduced tado° Smart Heat Pump Control, which together with the management software allows you to save 430 euros in electricity (with flexible tariffs, which do not yet concern the majority of Italians). The manager also showed how simple it can be connected to a home heat pump with a cable, and then controlled very quickly with a smartphone. Thus, not only can you control the heating of your home, but also the boiler directly: in this way you can heat the water only when needed.
The other news is tado° Balance, which allows you to buy electricity only when it is cheap. In this way, it heats the house when needed to lower costs. Not only are costs lower, but they also use more renewable energy. And it also increases transparency, you can follow everything directly from the app. If this service, by subscription, will not be very convenient for those who do not have flexible rates (even if they could make sure they consume more green energy by using it), making the heat pump smart can save money but have all the comforts we are used to (such as immediately hot water in the shower).
The tado° Smart Heat Pump Control cost 299.99 eurowith a year of free Balance, which then costs 49.99 euros.
Savings also for the electric car
Anna Wildenbeest, Product Manager of tado°, shows us another way that the company has found to save money by taking advantage of flexible rates. But it also allows you to understand the new direction in which tado° is moving, which wants to create an ecosystem (which they ensure is “open”) for energy saving.
Wildenbeest starts from a given: the number of electric car registrations increases of +25% annual. But if you have an electric car, you want to manage your bill well: 75% recharge at home, often at 5pm for 45 minutes, when energy with a dynamic bill costs more. To solve this problem, we launched tado° Smart Charging App, a free app that allows you to top up when it’s convenient. Just enter the time you want it to be charged. Plus, they make everything transparent, showing when you’ve spent hour by hour. Like Balance, you can control everything easily and with flexible rates you can save up to 300 euros in a year, even if your car is always charged in the morning.
Greater flexibility
Simon SchmitzCo-Founder & CEO of aWATTar, explains that the heart of the savings lies in the fact that, in the middle of the day, with dynamic tariffs the cost decreases a lot. This is because the sun produces the energy we need, while in the other hours we use the now very expensive fossil fuels much more. aWATTar buys energy on the European Energy Exchange market in a dynamic way, allowing customers on average to save up to 30%, or up to 730 euros on heating with a heat pump and an electric car. They currently only operate in Germany and Austria.
These innovations, while not all immediately exploitable by many of us due to tighter energy tariffs, point to a new direction for the company. tado° wants to become the queen of energy saving at 360 degrees: the CEO has promised that this is only “phase one” of their project. And we are very interested in following the rest.