Remember how the Nest thermostat promised to revolutionize home temperature management back in 2012? Nest Labs, the creators of the Nest learning thermostat, said it would ‘observe your heating and cooling habits’ and find ways to automate these changes itself and make it more energy-, and therefore cost-, efficient to heat and cool your home while requiring less effort and attention from the homeowner.
Hopefully, you also remember how the Nest thermostats were not liked by the public at first, and many were returned in favor of doing what the thermostat promised manually. Well, as is the trend with one less-than-successful product being followed by new hopeful companies’ own iteration and variations, a new smart thermostat is on the horizon for us, and it hails from Kickstarter and Tado Incorporated. The company calls it ‘tadoº Cooling’, and it has some rather impressive prospects.
The project was started on May 12, 2014, and is already more than 25% funded, with the final goal being $150,000, so that’s not too shabby. Tado Inc. is based in Munich, Germany, and has been in business since 2011, and since then has gathered a massive following in the European Union. They released their app, The Heating App, in 2012, and it was very well received. Now Tado aims to revolutionize how cooling is done, specifically in and for warmer countries globally, with the tadoº Cooling app and system. The new system works in conjunction with your existing, and probably-not-too-smart, air conditioning unit. The tadoº Cooling unit, a small, flat, round-cornered square, connects to the air conditioning unit using infrared (IR) and your phone (or whichever device you use to control the tadoº) connects to the tadoº using your home or local Wi-Fi network.
The tadoº will have (according to Tado Inc., on their Kickstarter page) a range of highly useful features. Tado highlights location-linked power-off function, so the AC turns off when the last person has left your home. This is also paired with the tadoº’s ability to pre-cool your home when it knows you’re coming closer/coming home. Using Bluetooth and Apple’s iBeacon technology, the owner is able to set and manage temperature room-by-room and room-to-room. tadoº also allows the control and maintenance of the humidity level in your home. Of course, you can still manually adjust your tadoº, using the capacitive-touch surface on the front of the unit, which also contains an LED matrix that gives an elegant, dot-font readout of the current temperature setting for the unit. And of course, the tadoº Cooling’s companion and control app will be available on both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
tadoº will retail for $149 per unit, but as always on Kickstarter, you can support an innovative company and get a discount of up to $80 off the final price for believing in Tado’s ambitious product. It is expected to begin shipping to backers in August (priority, development kits, and first 1,000 orders) and the remaining backers in September of 2014. Also, if you want to learn morea bout them and their goals, be sure to check out Tado’s website.