Building a house and want your ideas!

[JDRoberts]

For best performance with mesh networks, you generally want to move your SmartThings hub out of the media closet and locate it centrally in your home both vertically and horizontally, and in clear air. You’d also like it to be at least 3 m away from any Wi-Fi router or access point. It should work fine if you plug it into an ethernet access point, So you don’t have to have it in the media closet with your regular router.

There are Certainly people who put it right next to the router inside a media closet and get acceptable performance, but you almost always get your best mesh performance if you isolate it as you will lose fewer messages, Thus improving overall response time.

For more discussion specific to laying out your zigbee and zwave devices, see the following FAQ. Start with post 11 in that thread, then go up to the top and read the whole thing.

A Guide to Wireless Range & Repeaters

One more thought. While I understand the marketing reasons for the decision, the fact that SmartThings gives customers zero guidance on how to set up a network backbone does lead to a lot of frustration that shouldn’t have to exist. if people knew that .1) The hub should be located centrally in the home, both vertically and horizontally. Don’t put it in a garage or basement as those have concrete and pipes and metal objects which will reduce signal. If your Internet router is off in some inaccessible corner, you can use a Wi-Fi access point that has a ethernet port on the side and plug into that. Also, the hub should not be put in a cabinet. You just want to make it as easy as possible for signal to spread around your house. .2) you need one device that can repeat about every 40 feet…