Complex setup with terrible user interface - avoid!

The Somfy Tohoma has so many faults it is hard to sum them up in a short review, so I wrote a long review just so you can see just how terrible this product is for yourselves.

Setup is extremely complex and hard to do. Firstly, when registering the product, the website will not accept email addresses with a .co.uk extension. However, it does not give a straight forward message, it gives several erroneous and misleading messages such as “The confirmation of your password doesn’t match”. I tried other browsers such as Edge, Chrome, IE (yes I am an IT expert), but got the same result. I then guessed the level of incompetence of the programmers and used a .com email address instead. Bingo, now I could get in.

The web-based used interface is awful. Not exactly designed; more thrown together. First you select your dwelling (house, flat etc.) which sets some dreadful background graphics that a child could draw better. They somehow think putting badly designed icons of your devices on a badly drawn background of a house will make the experience better! Next you discover your devices. However, the Tohoma box just did not find the Velux Integra windows I have. The Velux windows and blinds use IO-Homecontrol protocol and can easily be found by the Velux KLR200 remote control during setup of the remote control. So, why does the Tohoma box not see them?? After an hour of trying, I gave up and left it until the morning.

Next morning, I guessed the idiotic programmer thought process. To configure every other Somfy product they require you to go fetch the remote control and put it into a special mode. Deep in my subconscious I remembered the Velux KLR200 remote has a “copy to another remote” mode. Once I had switched this on, the Tohoma box found all 10 devices. This is not something I would expect anyone without an IT background to figure out!

Somehow the devices got randomly assigned to rooms. There is no way to fix this without going back to select the “Habitat creation”. Very unintuitive! Moving devices cannot be done on the phone app either, so this was a real pain! Although the Tohoma purports to be a hub for all your home automation devices, it did not actually recognise / find anything else on my network. Not the Belkin WeMo switches, the Logitech Harmony Hub or even Somfy’s own products: the Huna blinds.

The Tohoma hub does work with Google Home and Google Assistant. Although the devices are visible in the Google Home app there are no actions you can take with them, rendering them useless. However, voice control does work. For example, you can open/close Velux blinds using “Hey Google, open the bedroom blinds”. You can even open Velux windows, but note that Google requests a security code to allow you to do that. I have no idea when this was set nor where to change it, so god help you if you don’t know the code!

In summary, the Somfy Tohoma is not so much a home automation hub, more a gateway to control a selection of Somfy or IO-Homecontrol devices (but not all of them!).

Other home hubs (e.g. SmartThings, Wink) are a fraction of the price and provide better integration and, more importantly, far better user experience.

Note to readers: this was written before I had Home Assistant and posted on Amazon in November 2019 as a review