"I'm worried about the connection" is something we hear about a lot from current and prospective clients.

Wifi is amazing, but it's not 100% foolproof yet, and if you have a poor wifi connection, your smart home won't work as well as it should. When your connection drops, devices stop talking to each other (and your control panel) and it can be an exercise in frustration to try to bring it all back up online. 

Here are some quick tips to help you keep your smart home connected.

1. Be careful where you put your router.

We get it. The New Year is coming soon, and it's the perfect time of year to rearrange some things in your home. New year. New home. New you.

But if you're moving your router, be careful. You need to keep it somewhere where the signal won't be interrupted. Keep it away from filing cabinets, fish tanks, mirrors, the fridge. Anything that might impede the signal.

2. Reboot your router every couple days.

This sounds like more of a pain in the butt than it really is, especially if your router is hooked up to a power strip. Turn off the router for a few minutes, and turn it back on to help it run more smoothly. This is basically like clearing out the memory. Routers have to deal with a lot of tasks and requests constantly, and sometimes things get stuck in the memory and can slow it down. Rebooting your router every couple days will save you a lot of frustration.

3. Get a new router.

If you got your router more than a couple years ago, it might be time for an upgrade. Newer models are faster and can distribute the signal more widely. They also have newer firmware, which is basically the software that lives on your router and helps your router do its job. If your device is old, or if your firmware is out of date and can't be updated, you're going to experience some lags and downtime.

4. Consider getting a network extender.

Life in a large home is grand until you get further and further away from your router. The signal naturally gets weaker the further away from the router you get. Luckily, you can just grab a network extender and alleviate part of this problem. Network extenders are affordable and easy to setup, and that one little device can drastically increase your WiFi signal.

5. Hard wire as much as possible.

When more and more devices are using the same signal, it can become a lot harder for each device to have the best signal. Your devices begin competing with each other. Reduce the load on the signal by hard wiring as much of your home as possible. Your media room and smart appliances should all be hard wired so you can have the strongest connection. If you're looking at getting a smart home installation setup, a qualified and reputable smart home installer will advise you on what devices it's OK to leave on the WiFi and what devices you should hard wire. 

If you're already a client and you have a few connectivity issues, give us a call and we'll get you sorted.

Ready to turn your home into a smart home? Give us a call and we'll take care of you the right way. Support is offered as part of all of our client packages.