Just finished cleaning up my home network and I’m now at the stage where I’m obsessing over things that may or may not matter.
House is around 2500 sq ft, three floors, with one AP per floor. Previous owner thankfully ran Ethernet pretty much everywhere, so I have plenty of wall jacks to work with.
The first-floor AP is the awkward one.
Right now it’s sitting on a side table facing upward because that was the easiest temporary setup. I could:
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mount it directly over the Ethernet jack, but that’s only about a foot off the floor
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put it on a stand
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run the cable higher behind furniture and wall-mount it around 6–7 ft up
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mount it high in plain sight and accept that my wife will eventually kill me
I keep reading conflicting opinions about AP height.
Does mounting it at 1 ft vs 6 ft actually make a noticeable difference in a normal house, or is this one of those things network people argue about because they’ve run out of VLANs to create?
You bought a wall AP and currently have it lying on a table staring at the ceiling. I feel like you already know at least part of the answer.
Height can matter, mostly because higher placement usually means fewer couches, cabinets, TVs, people, etc. directly in the path. But I wouldn’t drill holes just because Reddit says "higher good."Are you actually having coverage problems?
@Skeptical.pragmatist Mostly okay. The far end of the first floor and part of the patio are weaker than I’d like, but nothing is completely dead.
Then test it before changing anything permanently. If the network already does what you need, there’s no prize for having the prettiest heatmap.
I wouldn’t put the second AP in the dead zone.
Height matters, but there isn’t some universal “6 ft good, 1 ft bad” rule. Higher usually means fewer couches, cabinets, people, TVs, etc. in the path. But orientation matters too. Look at the radiation pattern for your AP. Wall-mounted and lying flat on a table are not necessarily equivalent.
Since you haven’t mounted it yet, I’d model the options before drilling anything. NetSpot’s Planning mode is actually pretty useful for this. Build the house as a multi-floor project, place your three APs, then compare the first-floor one low vs higher on the wall. You can account for the mounting height and antenna orientation/tilt too, so “on the table facing up” and “properly mounted on the wall” can be treated as different setups.
@Major_Peter It can model all three floors together? I assumed I’d have to make a separate plan for each floor.
NetSpot 6 has multi-floor Planning. You can build the floors as one building and see the predicted signal spread horizontally and vertically. That’s probably more useful here than arguing over whether 1 ft vs 6 ft is theoretically better.