tado°

What they do

tado° makes smart thermostats and radiator valves that connect home heating and cooling systems to an app. The system learns household routines, uses weather data and detects when the last person leaves, then adjusts temperatures to avoid heating empty rooms. It has broadened from thermostats into energy management, adding tools that optimise heat pumps, support dynamic electricity tariffs and schedule electric vehicle charging.

Why it matters

Heating is one of the largest sources of energy use and emissions in European homes, and much of it is wasted. A thermostat that switches off heating when nobody is home is a simple but effective intervention that does not require a new boiler or insulation. As more households install heat pumps and switch to tariffs that change hour by hour, the value shifts from control to orchestration: running heating when power is cheap and clean.

That shift makes tado° a partner to utilities as well as a consumer brand. The company works with energy suppliers including E.ON, Octopus Energy, OVO and Engie, and with Panasonic and Amazon. It describes itself as the European market leader in smart thermostats.

Products to know

• Smart Thermostat X: for boilers, radiators and underfloor heating.
• Smart Radiator Thermostat X: room-by-room control for individual radiators.
• Heat Pump Optimizer X: tuning heat pump operation for cost and efficiency.
• tado° app: the hub for control, energy insights and tariff features.

The German angle

Christian Deilmann, Johannes Schwarz and Valentin Sawadski founded tado° in Munich in 2011, after testing prototypes in their own homes; Leopold von Bismarck joined later. The founders came from the Technical University of Munich and MIT, and the company grew within Munich's consumer hardware and energy scene. It is a good example of German engineering applied to a mundane problem with large aggregate effects, and its products are now sold in some 20 countries, according to the company.