Where do you put your hubs and routers

Have been slowly building up my smart home devices but quickly the hubs have been building up . Sat on the sideboard at moment is Wi-Fi router , modem , ST hub ,hue hub, tado hub but this is slowly beginning to annoy the hell out of the wife . Can you please post some pics or tell me where you have relocated all your hubs too

I’ve got all mine stuck the be back of a sideboard using velcro with just the wifi router on top. all works perfectly fine and easily accessible as and when ever needed.

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I have my router, cable modem, an 8-port gigabit switch and all of my AV equipment (except projector/screen, TV’s and speakers of course) in the Infrastructure/AV Closet in the basement.

In my office, I have this:

  • The SmartThings hub is on the left (next to the magazines)
  • The WiFi Access Point (actually an old modem configured to be an access point) is in the center to the right of the kleenex box and to the left of my earphones and above my printer.
  • The 8-port gigabit switch that ties the den’s LAN-connected equipment to the router and modem in the basement, is on the right, next to my label maker and just below my Outside 4-Camera DVR.
  • Above that (top shelf) is one of my inside security cameras

it seems to look and work well this way. No complaints about how it looks from my wife - although she’s really very good with this stuff.

As a side note: I used to have the WiFi access point right next to the SmartThings hub and it ran fine - except I has having an issue (what turned out to be communications problems) with my door lock. When I moved the access point to its current location, the lock has been much more stable.

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I have a small cabinet next to the front door

In it,
Modem/router, POE Switch (power for CCTV, APs and secondary switch by TV on POE/PD). Also hue, lightwave & ST hubs, alarm, keys and QR code for guests’ WiFi :slight_smile: )


Nothing visible, happy wife :smiley:

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As a follow-up (and a bit off topic), here is the infrastructure/AV room where my router, modem, another 8-port gigabit switch and my AV stuff reside that I mentioned in my earlier message:

Update:
…and then I realized that I’m posting in the UK & Ireland thread… :frowning_face: I apologize!

I have all my hubs in my home office, behind a door on a simple Billy shelving unit from Ikea. Router and WiFi mesh points elsewhere as this seems best practice to reduce interference.

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I have the following hubs scattered around the house because I was afraid of interference from all of them. If all the radio wireless hubs can all sit in a cupboard somewhere without impacting the network, I will do that but is this smart? What are your thoughts.

I have the following hubs.

Orbi RBK50 wifi access point in 2 locations.
Hive hub
Hue Hub
Smartthings hub
Logitech Harmony hub
Alexa connect hub

Interestingly I just found this.

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Useful article that explains in detail the ZigBee-WiFi conflict I was broadly aware of. There are experts around here who will answer best, but I don’t have any (known) issue with clustering my hubs.
I would certainly keep your Orbis as far away as you can though. I have the luxury of hard wired ethernet in every room which I’m sure helps minimise conflict, if you have that option.

Have my router and other network stuff in a closet in the middle of the house on the bottom floor. I have my SmartThings hub locatesd more towards the front of the house in my Man Cave.

I keep an eye on the temp in the closet as it can get too hot in there in the summer.

All mine are under my desk in my study which is center front, lower floor of my two story, 4,100 sq ft home. No issues even though I have the ST hub and Hue Bridge very close to the router (tall white box in upper left) that serves 90% of my Wi-Fi devices (I have another router in the garage that handles the rest).

There is a door on this too so all this is enclosed.

IMG_0087

Mine all live in a cupboard under the stairs in a cheap 19" rack. Everything is there - Sky box, games consoles, video matrix, modem/router, server, ST Hub, Fibaro Hub, network switches, transformers for any LV stuff like the doorbell etc. Only exception is access points, which are at various locations around the house.

I will take a pic once I’ve finished re-wiring it.

I’m not too worried about the mesh stuff being under the stairs in a big metal box - as long as the signal can get to the next nearest node it doesn’t really matter. Plus it’s worked pretty flawlessly for years, so not an issue for me. Access points for Wifi are of course a different story, but those are scattered around the house.

The short answer is that whatever works for you is fine. There’s a lot of variation and much depends on the exact amount and type of network traffic that you have.

If you have a couple of teenagers doing high def WiFi Streaming from multiple devices during every waking minute, you’re much more likely to find your zigbee getting drowned out than if you just have One or two Wi-Fi devices browsing the Internet or running home automation devices.

Similarly, if you are using energy-reporting Z wave devices for live updates every 30 seconds or so you’re going to have a lot more traffic on those networks than if you just use them for occasional “switch on, switch off“ Commands.

Almost all IOT hubs will be “Omnidirectional“ which means the signal spreads as it moves away from the transmission antenna. So if you can keep your hubs at least one meter apart you’re a lot less likely to get interference between them. And if they are transmitting on the same frequency, such as zigbee and Wi-Fi, best practices says to put them at least 3 m apart. But again, if what you have now is working for you, you don’t have to worry about it. :sunglasses:

The article linked to above is already referenced in the community FAQs on Wi-Fi and Zigbee interference. If you are having problems, you should take a look at those as they have additional details specific to SmartThings:

.

Most people would hate my setup, but it’s designed for minimum maintenance, maximum coverage.

One wall of my bedroom has white wood floating shelves staggered and about 2 m apart horizontally. Then I use white raceway cable covers for the cords.

Obviously the following pictures aren’t of my own setup, but these are the typical components:

image image image

Since I don’t have much use of my hands, I need to be able to easily direct someone else to do whatever maintenance is required, and this setup both simplifies that process and generates the best transmission spread. :sunglasses:

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