Support

Use it — Tepi isn’t a replacement for it, and both change your thermostats the same way: a local HomeKit write. Neither is faster than the other.

The difference that matters is that the Home app doesn’t know tado° exists. It sees a generic thermostat. So when you change a temperature there, it can’t tell you that tado° has received it as a hold that may never expire — which silently stops that room following its schedule, from then on. Nothing in the Home app says so, because nothing in the Home app can know. Tepi does, and every temperature it writes has an undo: Resume tado° schedule, per room or for the house.

It also checks that the change actually landed. HomeKit reports success when a write is accepted, not when it takes effect — and through a bridge, a room can accept every change and control nothing. The Home app shows the new number and moves on. Tepi reads the thermostat back and tells you when it reports something else.

Then the smaller things: every room’s temperature on one screen instead of three taps each, room history, battery and firmware per device, and both tado° generations in one list whichever way they reach your home.

Where the Home app is better, plainly: everything else in your house, automations that run because a home hub executes them, widgets, Control Center, Siri and the Watch. Tepi has none of those. If you have one tado° room and change it twice a winter, the Home app is all you need.

Keep it. Tepi deliberately doesn’t do everything tado° does, and a few things only their app can change: your schedules, the per-room setting that decides how long a manual change lasts, Auto-Assist, and anything to do with your tado° subscription or billing.

Tepi is the screen for the thing you do every day — look at the house, change a room. The rest stays where it was.

Tepi reads your rooms from Apple's Home app, so they have to be there first. Open Home and check your tado° devices appear.

For tado° V3+, the Internet Bridge speaks HomeKit directly: in Home, tap +, then Add Accessory, and scan the HomeKit code on the bridge or in its manual. No HomePod or Apple TV needed.

For tado° X, which uses Matter over Thread, your home needs Thread connectivity before Apple will let the devices join at all — usually a HomePod, an Apple TV, or another Thread border router. That is Apple's requirement, not Tepi's: what the Home app can't see, Tepi can't see either.

If Home shows them and Tepi doesn't, check Settings → Privacy & Security → HomeKit → Tepi.

This is the most common thing people write to me about, and it isn't Tepi — it happens in Apple's own Home app too. The short version: a HomeKit home belongs to an Apple Account, not to an address. Living in the same house, on the same Wi-Fi, with the same thermostats on the wall, doesn't give a second iPhone any access to them.

The person who set the thermostats up has to invite the other person: Home app → the house icon → Home Settings → Invite People. Once that invitation is accepted, the thermostats appear in their Home app, and Tepi finds them with no extra setup. Give them Allow Editing, and Allow Remote Access if they should be able to use Tepi away from home.

But there's a catch, and it may stop you. Under Apple's current Home architecture, inviting anyone requires a home hub — a HomePod, HomePod mini or Apple TV. An iPad no longer counts. Check under Home Settings → Home Hubs & Bridges.

If there is no hub listed, the invitation simply isn't available, and there is nothing Tepi or any other app can do about it: the second person cannot see those thermostats in Apple Home at all, so no app reading from Apple Home can show them. The options are to add a hub, or for that person to use the tado° app instead, which uses a tado° account rather than a HomeKit home.

On their phone, Tepi should be saying "No home set up yet" with instructions underneath. If it says something else — or nothing — tell me, because that would be a bug.

No. Everyday control — temperatures, off, boost — goes straight to the thermostats over HomeKit and never touches tado°. Adding your account is optional and enables the things HomeKit doesn't carry: generation badges, room history, device health, showing and changing tado° schedules, handing a room back to its schedule, and reaching the house when you're away without an Apple home hub.

Tap Explore a demo home on the first screen or in Settings. It's a synthetic household — both generations, two accounts, a room behind a bridge, one unreachable — and nothing leaves your phone while it's running.

Linking is how Tepi knows which tado° room a HomeKit thermostat is. It matches on the device serial first, and on the room's name second.

Open that room and scroll down — Tepi prints the serial it looked for and every name it tried. If tado° reports none of them, the room is called something different in the two apps. Rename it on either side so they match, then use Sync rooms with tado° in Settings.

Renaming the room inside Tepi links it immediately and costs nothing against your daily tado° allowance, because Tepi already knows what tado° calls its rooms — it just couldn't connect the two names.

Tepi will not guess. A name that could mean two different tado° rooms produces no link rather than a wrong one, because the cost of a wrong link is a command sent to the wrong radiator.

Home Assistant users: HA publishes its entity id where HomeKit expects a serial number, and Tepi reads the tado° serial out of it. If you have renamed a valve in Home Assistant, its entity id no longer contains the serial (climate.guest_bathroom rather than climate.tado_smart_radiator_thermostat_va0000000001), so name matching is all that's left.

Tepi builds its rooms from the Home app. With tado° X, the same radiators can be in the Home app twice: once through a bridge, as one thermostat per tado° room, and once as the devices themselves, if you also added them over Thread. Tepi then shows that tado° room twice, and its room screen says so. Both work. Hide the one you don't use (press and hold its tile, then Hide room), so All off and Resume schedules don't reach it twice.

A Home app room holding devices from more than one tado° room is locked, because one change there would reach several tado° rooms at once. Tepi locks it when your tado° account places its devices in different rooms or, when it can't tell, when the room has more than one temperature sensor or more than one room thermostat. In the Home app, put each device in a room that matches its tado° room, and Tepi follows.

Tepi says “Your tado° sign-in has expired”. Changing temperatures at home keeps working; only what needs tado° — handing rooms back to their schedule, history, changes from away — waits until you sign in again.

Why it happens. Every app that connects to tado° from outside — Tepi, Home Assistant, Homebridge, Homey and others — has to sign in with the same app identity, called a client ID, which tado° publishes for all of them. To tado°, they all look like one app. So when two of them are signed in to the same tado° account, one renewing its sign-in can push the other one out.

The workaround, as tado° suggests it: give each app its own tado° login. In the tado° app, invite a new person to your home using another email address you own, accept the invitation, and sign in to Tepi with that login. Do the same for each other integration, one email address each.

The cleanest solution would be for tado° to give Tepi a client ID of its own, so that no other app could sign it out. If you'd like that too, you can suggest it to tado° support — requests from customers count: tado° support for V3+ · tado° support for tado° X.

This is the check Tepi exists for, and it is worth taking seriously. A bridge whose tado° integration has lost its token keeps reporting temperatures and keeps accepting changes while the valve never moves. Everything looks fine and the room stays cold.

If Tepi says tado° holds the room at one temperature and the thermostat reports another, something between them has stopped listening — on a Home Assistant setup, usually its tado° integration needing to sign in again.

tado° allows 100 API requests a day on a free account. Tepi is careful with them — nothing polls in the background, and it keeps the last few in reserve — but a day of heavy browsing can reach it.

Changing temperatures at home is unaffected: that goes to the thermostat over HomeKit. History, device health, resuming a schedule and remote access all need tado°, so they wait until the allowance resets.

Off sends HomeKit's off, which tado° treats as switching the room off — frost protection. Some thermostats, particularly ones bridged through Home Assistant, publish a target temperature and no on/off control at all. Tepi can't send off to those, so it turns the room down to the lowest temperature the valve accepts and says so rather than pretending it went off.

If the room is linked to a tado° account, Tepi switches it off through tado° instead, which works regardless of what the valve exposes.

Tepi sends a change and then reads the thermostat back a few seconds later to check it took. This message means the read didn't get through — not that the change failed. A write can succeed and the read still fail, particularly through a bridge.

Worth checking the radiator, or the room in the tado° app.

Three usual causes, none of them Tepi: the boiler is in summer mode, the valve isn't driving its radiator, or another zone is holding the system. Tepi says so explicitly when the thermostat itself reports that it has accepted the setting and isn't heating.

Any temperature change — from Tepi, from the tado° app, or from the dial on the wall — reaches tado° as an overlay, and a tado° setting per room decides how long one lasts. Set to “until I change it”, which many homes are, the room stops following its schedule from that moment.

Resume schedule on a room, or for the whole house, hands it back. It needs a linked tado° account: HomeKit knows a temperature and nothing about where it came from.

Optional help that notices things and offers — it never acts on its own. Two parts so far: Presence, a reminder when you leave home and when you come back, and Suggestions, based on what you usually do. Both are off until you turn them on under Settings → Tepi Assist.

It's marked experimental because it will change and grow, not because it's careless: nothing changes your heating until you tap, and turning it off removes everything it had scheduled.

Set home under Home with Set home to where I am now, at home — with Precise Location on for Tepi, which iOS needs to watch a circle this small. When you leave, iOS shows “You've left home — tap to set the house to Eco” (or to switch everything off); when you come back, “Welcome home — tap to hand the heating back to its tado° schedule” (or Comfort, if you don't use a tado° account). Tapping opens Tepi and does it. Ignoring it does nothing.

iOS watches the circle around home itself, so Tepi needs location only While Using the App, isn't woken in the background, and never tracks where you are. It can't know whether someone else is still at home — that's why it asks rather than acts.

Open Settings → Tepi Assist. The line under Presence says whether it's working and, if not, why — usually location, Precise Location or notifications switched off for Tepi in the iPhone's Settings. What Assist did lists every reminder iOS showed.

iOS decides when it notices you've crossed the circle, and it can be a few minutes late, particularly in a town with few Wi-Fi networks around. A bigger circle (500 m) helps if you live close to where you spend the day. If reminders keep missing, please tell me: that is exactly what this experimental version is for.

Tepi learns from what you do in Tepi — which room, what temperature, what time of day — and after about two weeks offers it at the right moment: “You usually set the living room to 21° around 18:30 on weekdays. Do it?” Every suggestion says what it's based on.

Few is at most one a day, inside Tepi only. Some and More add quiet notifications (no sound, no screen lighting up). Nothing between 23:00 and 06:00; two ignored in a row and it halves for a week; Stop suggesting this mutes one for good.

Use outdoor temperature (off until you turn it on) adds suggestions for cold days — only for rooms you have actually heated in similar weather. The forecast comes from Apple Weather for where home is set (the Home section), asked at most once an hour and never used after Apple says it expires.

Switching Suggestions off forgets everything they learned; switching them on again starts from nothing.

iOS learns from the same actions and may offer them on the Lock Screen or in Search. You can turn that off in the iPhone's Settings → Apps → Tepi → Siri. Tepi's own learning stays on your iPhone. What iOS learns is Apple's Siri Suggestions, which Apple says learns on the device and, with iCloud, syncs end-to-end encrypted between your Apple devices. With outdoor temperature on, your home location rounded to about 1 km goes to Apple Weather for the forecast. None of it reaches the developer.

Say “Set the heating to Eco with Tepi”, or build a shortcut in the Shortcuts app with Set the whole house, Set a room group, Set a room or Set a room's temperature. Tepi opens to do it, because Apple Home only takes commands from an app that's on screen. Siri understands these in English, German, Dutch, French, Italian and Spanish — in the language Siri is set to.

Tepi on Apple Watch comes with Tepi on the iPhone (watchOS 10 or later). Open Tepi on your iPhone once — that is what tells the watch which rooms there are, what you called them, their order and your groups. Then open Tepi on the watch: it explains, then asks for access to Home, and your rooms appear.

The watch reaches your radiators through Apple Home itself, the same way the Home app on the watch does: at home directly, away from home through a home hub (HomePod or Apple TV). It never goes through the iPhone and never through tado°'s servers, so the iPhone can stay in your pocket — or at home.

Tap a room and turn the Digital Crown: the number changes as you turn, and Tepi sends it once you stop for a moment — one change, not one per click. Off and Boost are under it. All off, Comfort and Eco are at the top of the list, and each of your groups has its own. A tap on your wrist means Apple Home took it; a buzz means it didn't, and the room says why.

Tepi starts a change only while it's on the watch's screen, like the iPhone: Apple Home takes changes only from the app in front. If you leave the screen while a change is under way, it stops before the next radiator or room. The one exception: a radiator that was off and has just been switched on still gets the temperature you asked for, so it isn't left heating at an old one.

The watch shows the rooms your iPhone shows — hidden ones stay hidden — and changes only the ones Tepi may change on the iPhone. A room with a lock is one the iPhone can't change either until it's linked; do that on the iPhone.

“Not found on this watch” means the watch's Apple Home has nothing that is clearly that room. Tepi never guesses: two devices with the same name are refused rather than picked from. Open Tepi on your iPhone so the watch gets the latest list. The watch finds rooms by their devices' names in Apple Home, so a room whose devices share a name with others in the same Home room can't be told apart — renaming one in the Home app fixes it.

Away from home, Apple Home needs a home hub to reach your radiators — on the watch exactly as in the Home app. Without one, every room says it isn't responding, and the list says why once at the top. Tepi on the iPhone can still reach rooms through tado° if you've signed in; the watch doesn't use tado°'s servers at all.

Turn it on in Settings → Tepi Assist → Schedules: Show only looks, Edit can change. It needs a signed-in tado° account, because HomeKit knows nothing about tado° schedules. Then open a room and tap Schedule: its week, as tado° holds it, on V3+ and tado° X.

In Edit you can move a time, split or remove a block, change a temperature, and copy the week to other rooms. Nothing reaches tado° until you press Save.

Tepi first says which days will change and how many of tado°'s daily requests the save uses. It then reads tado°'s copy again, so a change made in the tado° app meanwhile isn't overwritten, sends the change, and reads it back to check tado° kept exactly what you saved. If it didn't, or only some days went through, Tepi says which.

Before every save, the previous version is kept on your iPhone. The clock icon on a room's schedule lists them, and Restore puts one back.

Schedules always leaves part of tado°'s daily allowance untouched, so changing a temperature through tado° still works afterwards. If too little is left, it says so and waits for tomorrow rather than starting a save it can't finish.

A temperature set by hand — in Tepi, the tado° app or on the dial — can stop a room following its schedule until something changes it (see What happened to my tado° schedule? above). With Schedules on, Tepi notices when that has lasted more than a day and says so on the Rooms screen. Resume schedule on the room's screen hands it back.

With Suggestions on, Tepi can notice that what you set by hand keeps disagreeing with a room's schedule — every weekday evening, say — and offer a change. Change the schedule opens the editor with the change made and unsaved; nothing is sent until you press Save. Not now puts it aside; Never for this room stops ideas for that room.

Nothing. No accounts of its own, no servers, no analytics, no tracking. Your tado° token lives in your iPhone's Keychain and everything else stays on the device — including your exact home location, if you set one. With outdoor temperature on, Apple Weather gets it rounded to about 1 km. The full text is in the privacy policy.

Settings → Reset all Tepi data clears favourites, order, hidden rooms, cached history, signed-in tado° accounts and everything Tepi Assist learned or scheduled. Your thermostats and their tado° settings are untouched, and rooms you renamed keep their new name, because the rename went into Apple's Home app. Deleting the app removes the rest.