The house I’m living in is quite strange in regard to WLAN reception. It’s a house for four families that I own. It has four floors (including cellar and roof) and that is one of the problems.
For 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 throughout 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 flawlessly. Renters get a LAN port to connect their network to the WLAN infrastructure. Most of them try their own WLAN at first just to use my WLAN infrastructure after a while because no brand of SOHO gear is really working.
Why am I 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 channel 1 in the apartment in the roof and in the cellar without interference.
However there is a problem. I’m using Zigbee for humidity and temperature monitoring in common spaces and I had problems for a long time that I got measurements at night but not during the day in my Grafana dashboard.
I’m using WLAN for quite some 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 points. 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 Zigbee channel 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 capable of using it). As I’m using zigbee2mqtt, I had to make a slight change in the configuration.yaml file. I had to add the channel option in the advanced section.
advanced:
channel: 26
Since this change I have perfect reception for my Zigbee equipment in my home.
