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Update: I went with the wireless retrofit on that old brick house and it was a nightmare
Had a job on a 1920s brick house downtown where the owner wanted to keep the old wired sensors but add motion and glass break. I had to pick between trying to fish new wire through solid brick and plaster or using a wireless retrofit kit. I chose the wireless kit, thinking it would be faster. Big mistake. The brick walls blocked the signals so bad that the new sensors kept going offline. I spent three whole days just moving receivers around and adding repeaters, and the customer was getting really annoyed. I finally got it stable, but it cost me an extra day of labor I couldn't charge for. Has anyone else had major signal problems in old brick buildings? What's your go-to fix?
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riley_taylor7mo ago
Sounds like you found out the hard way that old brick is basically a faraday cage. I see this same thing with wifi in old city apartments, where people pay for gigabit but get dial-up speeds in the back bedroom because of the walls. Sometimes the only real fix is to run a cable and just accept the extra work.
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hall.nina7mo ago
My buddy in a pre-war building had the same issue. He bought a fancy mesh system but the signal died in his kitchen. We found his plaster walls had metal mesh inside them. He ended up drilling a tiny hole to run an ethernet cable to his TV. The difference was night and day.
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margaret_gonzalez257mo ago
But drilling holes is such a MESS. I'd rather deal with a weak signal than patch up plaster later.
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