Location of network equipment whole home coverage. need reco's for wiring and finishes

So I wired the basement to the 2nd floor over the weekend and recouped the E2500 (both bands) as APs. Installed an app on my phone that auto switches between the strongest AP (with same SSID), and determined the 5Ghz band still doesnt cover the entire house sufficiently. I have connection and good speeds everywhere, but still not where I “want” it to be.

Also bought a Belkin 5 port 100 meg router from Lowes for $7.50 (on sale from $29). Nothing fancy, but I put it in the kitchen and moved the ST hub to its location. The center of the main floor, for better overall coverage. The nice thing about it; WAF hasnt changed. I dont even think shes noticed the 2 new devices sitting by the Echo!

So now I guess Ill be OTL for dual band Ubiquiti WAPs, preferably the “lite” models


This is on the main floor, sitting on the couch. Should it suffice?

I hope that should suffice!

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Its where the majority of my network connected PEDs would be, so I hope Im happy with it for the long haul. It may push my WAP purchase to the right and allow me to focus on HA things.

If it was affecting WAF, putting it in a cabinet, etc could help. The frequency of z-wave and zigbee is robust enough to not really be hindered greatly by being in an enclosure.

I may do that in the future, but that would require me to run electrical into the cabinet. I dont like to see wires.

Depends very much on the materials of the enclosure. Metal cabinets will definitely cut signal strength, as will lacquered wood, paper mache, stone, most ceramic, and tinted glass. Plain wood or plastic is usually fine, small degradation in strength but not a lot. Clear glass is usually OK, so a glass front lacqeur cabinet might be fine in one direction, dead in another.

The lower 900mhz range has very good signal penetration capability. Think back to the 900mhz cordless phones. Obviously a metal box is a bad idea, and glass tinted with a metallic film is bad, too, but other than that, it’s not going to kill the signal like a Faraday cage.

Not like a Faraday cage, but that red Chinese lacquer paint you see on some entertainment cabinets often has metallic elements that can degrade signal significantly. The red is typically added iron oxide, and the lacquer has a wax in it that fills in all the air spaces. They can be almost as bad as a metal filing cabinet for signal block. It won’t be a total block, but it won’t be like a pine cabinet, either. :sunglasses:

(I used to work as a network engineer, we saw some crazy stuff in big office building installs.)

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Interesting. I was more thinking kitchen cabinet or buffet kinda thing, but wasn’t specific :slight_smile:

If I were to install it in a cabinet, it would be a kitchen style cabinet. Its currently sitting on my desk nook in the kitchen.

Ive considered putting some small sections of hook and loop on the bottom of the ST hub and the small switch, then affixing them to the underside of the counter as a way to hide them in plain sight.

The hub would be between 2 cabinets with an open space large enough to slide a chair between the 2
cabinets. This shouldnt be too confined, right?

An old pic from realtor.com (before I bought).

That would be absolutely fine

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Perfect. Thanks.

The only thing to the right in this pic is the kitchen and laundry room and entry from garage and Ill have wired devices in both rooms for any coverage to the farthest garage device that may get installed.

The rest of the rooms all flow into each other rather openly, so signal degradation should be minimal for the hub in this location as opposed to the basement under the stairs.

Were you actually having trouble with devices connecting where it was, or being proactive? My analogy to the 900mhz cordless phone still applies, not to mention the wired devices as repeaters.

Kinda. I had noticed through all the rewiring and reconfiguring of my network devices, that the laundry room door IRIS contact sensor was flashing like a bowl of fruity pebbles. It was still showing status updates in the app, but sporadically.

Once I moved the hub, its been gtg. I even added another contact sensor in the basement, and it appears to be a healthy connection.

Keep in mind, I only have 4 contact sensors in my HA setup. The “honey-do” list has shifted paradigms which has halted my expansion. Although I do plan on buying a few Aeon micro controllers in the near future.