tado° GmbH is a German technology company headquartered in Munich (Germany) and a

manufacturer of home thermostats and air conditioning controls. The company's first product,
tado° Heating, was launched in November 2012 in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, and in
2013 in the United Kingdom. tado° GmbH is a Munich based tech startup bringing the Internet
of Things into the Cleantech Market.

Besides reducing energy consumption and increasing savings, the thermostat also considers the
residents' overall comfort. tado° detects the absence or presence of residents via smartphone and
then adjusts the heating automatically. Weather forecasts and the heating properties of a home
such as insulation are taken into account.

In June 2015, smart AC Control was added to the company's operation, allowing customers to
control their air conditioners intelligently. Their app adapts to the actions of the residents in real
time, as well as weather forecasts and building characteristics.
Problem
The business aimed to take advantage of the Internet of Things by creating truly intelligent
digital controls and personalizations of everyday activities and desires. In order to provide user-
friendly automation and reduce energy consumption, common IoT challenges had to be
addressed, including recording, storing, and analysing metrics and events (time series data) from
heaters, radiators, and air conditioners.
The company's products and design had to change as its customer base expanded. Recognizing
the value of providing regular reports to customers in order to show observable cost and energy
savings, tado° also required the opportunity to react in real time to customers' changing habits.
To do so, tado° needed to collect more data in order to automatically control the heating and air
conditioning systems without the users' involvement.

The tado° team used MySQL to build their first metrics database to help them quickly launch
their service. They realised they needed a solution that could scale with them as their company
expanded, so they chose InfluxDB to power their IoT platform. And, despite switching to
InfluxDB for their time series database, they kept using MySQL to power their app's user reports
(graphs). These graphs were sluggish and only had a few features.

The Solution
To power their user reports, tado° decided to move from their legacy MySQL solution to
InfluxDB. In addition, they were able to incorporate new features to the reports, making it even
easier for their customers to drive energy efficiency.
To get started quickly, tado° built a simple custom solution that captures time series data from
their 500 customers using a single MySQL table. As the number of customers increased from
500 to 5,000, tado° had to adjust the solution by setting up a separate MySQL instance and
separating the different time series forms (for example, all of the devices' inside temperatures)
into a single MySQL table.

However, as their customer base expanded to 100,000, this solution was no longer able to
manage the load, prompting tado° to conduct an online search, where they discovered InfluxDB
1.0. Furthermore, tado°'s customer temperature graph (user report) in their mobile apps, which
was originally powered by MYSQL, had become extremely slow and lacked features such as
humidity and weather data collection and display. They aimed for a 99 percent response time of
500ms and data retention of 12 months to give customers a full year's worth of system results.

They load-tested InfluxDB 1.0 with these specifications in mind. After a rocky start due to
performance issues with LAST() queries that resulted in slow user report response times, tado°
upgraded to InfluxDB 1.1, which unexpectedly improved query performance by 200 times.

In tado° 's use case, InfluxDB serves as the time series data store to store and analyze metrics
from their devices.

The data trail from tado° device to InfluxDB

References:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86XntYsXpP4
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tado%C2%B0
https://www.influxdata.com/customer/iot-monitoring-with-tado/