With half an eye on Black Friday deals, I’m thinking about Mesh systems.
We live in a 3 bed mid terraced Yorkshire stone house over four levels (cellar to attic). The Plusnet router is doing a reasonable job, but signal can be a little patchy in the cellar and far end of attic. It doesn’t however reach the garage which is 15m across the lane from the house with the garden behind that.
I’d like to be able to extend the WiFi in to the garden and garage.
So what would we need? 3 units in house, plus 1 in garage and an external unit mounted at the back of the garage to cover the garden or is this overkill?
I’ve used Tp Link products in the past and they look reasonable prices. Presumably go for wifi6? I’d prefer to keep away from a subscription service. I’m happy for the system to replace the router.
We’re on 500/75mb connection.
thanks 😊
We use a 3-node TP link deco setup in our stone barn heap. It really needs a physical backhaul to make the most of it. Wifi simply doesn't go through stone walls, especially if you've lined the inside with kingspan and built a faraday cage.
Deco here, it just works. 3x X50(?) pods, which is the core network; I then added on some M4s, which don't work quite as seamlessly, but still do a great job.
As hot_fiat says, ideally you want the Decos hardwired together for the backhaul; and I'd definitely want to have a cable to the garage ideally.
I can't comment on Wifi 6 as I don't actually know about it; I know none of our home devices use it, but perhaps it allows you to use WiFi 6 for the backhaul and 2.4/5Ghz for devices to connect to?
TP Link Deco here too in a stone-walled cottage and annexe.
It really needs a physical backhaul to make the most of it.
Indeed. Two of the units in the house are connected by a powerline adaptor socket things that I found in a charity shop
Main mesh unit in lounge -> powerline adaptor -> powerline adaptor -> Dining Room mesh unit -> wifi -> Stable mesh unit -> wifi -> Annex mesh unit -> our work laptops
Also have a mesh unit upstairs in the house which connects via wifi to the main one (there's just floorboards between them).
I keep meaning to run an ethernet cable out to the annex to give a physical connection, but it all works pretty much okay, and that's with only a meagre 12mb coming through the broadband pipe anyway.
plus 1 in garage and an external unit mounted at the back of the garage to cover the garden or is this overkill?
The one in the garage will probably be fine to cover the garden (assuming it's just a brick garage)
Deco is easy to set up and works well, added advantage is if/when you change broadband provider and get a new router, you don't need to reconnect all of your Wi-Fi devices as they are already connected to Deco, not your router.
Can't comment on stone wall issue though
Thanks. We have got a couple of powerline adapters that I could try running over to the garage, though the electrics are odd in this house, it can randomly trip half the house with no obvious cause
I couldn't get mesh/extenders to work well between house and shed, and it's less than 10m. Gap was too big with no relay in the middle, even with the router right up against a single glazed window.
Now the BB fibre box goes to a 1:4 switch, with cables to office upstairs (to PC and wifi which serves the house) out to the shed and to the telly in the living room.
Fast, stable connection. Meant I could save a bit of money on BB package, because I wasn't paying for extra speed to overcome signal issues (which doesn't really work anyway). Bit of faff, but well worth it.
If the standard mesh access points don't stretch from house to garage you can use something like the bridge below to link two of the mesh access points rather than needing to run a cable between the two.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/TP-Link-EAP211-BRIDGE-bridge-repeater-Network-white/dp/B0D4H6XRNM
This is what we've done at our new place as it wasn't going to be easy to get a new cable in. Despite some fairly dense foliage in the line of sight for the bridge it's all working without issue. Still can't get on the Wi-Fi mesh in the middle of the garden but around the house and the garage (where the access points are) everything just works.
For our similar stone house (long rather than tall, but similar issues) a few months ago I bought and installed these: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0B2RQR96Y with wired connections along the upper floor of our house to replace the increasingly iffy TP powerline adaptors we'd been using and they have been 99.9% great with good signal across the whole house. (The 0.1% was a few weeks ago when my PC decided that somehow it was on a wired connection one of the nodes rather than wifi. A reset cured it and it's not happened again.)
I was then able to place the TP extender/repeater which previously had just managed to get a signal across 20-odd meters of the garden to the garage (so long as you stood in the garage window) into the garage itself, where it picks up the mesh system signal just fine and repeats it across the garage and surroundings without wiring back to the house or having to buy another node (although i dare say that would be better).
Definitely recommend doing it.
TP Link Deco here too in a stone-walled cottage and annexe.
It really needs a physical backhaul to make the most of it.
Indeed. Two of the units in the house are connected by a powerline adaptor socket things that I found in a charity shop
Main mesh unit in lounge -> powerline adaptor -> powerline adaptor -> Dining Room mesh unit -> wifi -> Stable mesh unit -> wifi -> Annex mesh unit -> our work laptops
Also have a mesh unit upstairs in the house which connects via wifi to the main one (there's just floorboards between them).
I keep meaning to run an ethernet cable out to the annex to give a physical connection, but it all works pretty much okay, and that's with only a meagre 12mb coming through the broadband pipe anyway.
plus 1 in garage and an external unit mounted at the back of the garage to cover the garden or is this overkill?
The one in the garage will probably be fine to cover the garden (assuming it's just a brick garage)
Update!
The powerline adapters work and reach the garage. So the above combination of powerline and mesh sounds ideal.
I might try just the indoor units and see if the garage one reaches in to the garden to start with and add the external unit if it’s not strong enough
In looking at the options, I’ve just discovered that Tp link do a hybrid mesh system. Using powerline and mesh in the same units! Could be the solution
https://www.tp-link.com/uk/home-networking/deco/deco-p9/
Just upgraded from 3x Dlink Covr x1850 (Wifi 6) to 3x Eero Pro 7 (wifi 7 and soon to be wired backhaul). My RSP had an offer on so I upgraded. 1000/100 connection. Flies. Very happy with it.