The house i’m living is quite strange in regard of WLAN reception. It’s a house for four families i’m owning. It’s with four floors (including cellar and roof) and that is one of the problems.
Out of whatever reason i can’t get good WLAN reception even one floor up or down and with the usual SOHO WLAN gear it’s even hard to get WLAN reception thoughtout the floor. I suspect in this building electronic equipment would work even after a strike with an EMP weapon … at least when i consider the WLAN problems. I only got perfect reception everywhere in the building when i switched to pro (or almost pro) equipment.
Currently i have four UniFi UAP-AC-LR running here. It may be slight overkill but it works absolutely flawless. Renters get a LAN port to connect their network to the WLAN infrastructure. Most of them try this on their own WLAN at first just to use my WLAN infrastructure after a while because no brand of SOHO gear is really working.
Why i’m talking about this. Well, i’m using channels 1,6 and 11 for 2.4 Ghz. This configuration is the only one where you don’t have radio channel overlap. When using 2.4 Ghz you should use those channels to prevent interference. The strange shielding properties of this building allow me to reuse the channel 1 in the appartment in the roof and in the cellar without reception.
However there is a problem. I’m using Zigbee for humidity and temperature monitoring in common spaces and i had for a long time problems that i got measurements in the night but not over the day in my Grafana Dashboard.
I’m using WLAN for quite a time (i used it for example to connect a student dormitory back in 1997 to the University of Oldenburg when i lived in this dormitory) and i had my fair share of issues with interference effects.
Okay, i’m using some long range access point. Is it possible that my WLAN is totally drowning out all the Zigbee traffic at the times people use WLAN most? I checked my Zigbee configuration and quickly found out that i’m using the default Zigbeechannel 11. This overlaps with WLAN channel 1.
I quickly changed the channel of Zigbee to 26. This doesn’t overlap with WLAN (but has the disadvantage that not all devices are capapble to use it). As i’m using zigbee2mqtt, i had to do a slight change in the configuration.yaml file. I had to add the channel option in to the advanced section.
advanced:
channel: 26Since this change i have perfect reception for my Zigbee equipment in my home.