I am having issues with Wifi throughout the house and I am getting frequent drop offs from bulbs and sensors that are far from the hub. I was looking at adding a mesh network to my wifi, the house is about 3,500 sqft.
I was at Home Depot today and on the sale rack they have a bunch of Linksys Velop mesh wifi devices. The one that has a 3-pack - for larger homes - is on sale for $150. The one that is a two pack is $100. I see them on Amazon for much more ($271 and $172 respectively).
Is anyone familiar with these units and are they worth it? I was looking at others that were much more expensive, but with these prices I thought I would check them out.
What types of bulbs and sensors? Zigbee and Z-Wave devices will not benefit in any way from a stronger WiFi Mesh network. Zigbee and Z-Wave need repeater devices specific to each of their protocols in order to strengthen their respective mesh networks.
Before I moved into my new House I used the Velop system and it worked very well. You can put them near a TV or other device and hard wire that device to them. Then the Velop Node will communicate to the other node near your router. This saves wireless bandwidth and is also good for devices that do not have wireless. I got speeds of about 200-300mb wirless. For $150 for 3 I would give it a try.
Depends on if you get the dual band or tri band units. I had four dual band and and wasn’t fast enough communication speeds. Went with netgear orbi tri band system and has been great for me.
I’m running the tri-band versions (4 nodes) so I can get wifi out to my metal sided pole barn. Like my experience w/ SmartThings, some firmware updates seem to cause instability in the system for a while. Once I do some restarts on the nodes things settle down and go back to normal. I really should turn off automatic firmware updates…
Overall I’m pleased w/ the system as everything else I tried (WiFi repeaters/Ethernet over Powerline) wasn’t reliable.