The placement of your Wi-Fi router is critical for accessing the best possible wireless signal. With this in mind, you might have moved your router all over the house and are now thinking about installing it in the attic.
In general, you should not put a wireless router in your attic. While some people living or working in or near an attic might benefit from a router there, other places in the house will not get as good a wireless signal.
Today, we will be looking at why the attic might or might not be the best for router placement and where you can put it instead if the attic isn’t the best for you.
Is the Attic a Good Place for a Wireless Router?
We all want to get the best possible internet signal from our wireless routers. Some people try putting their wireless routers all over the house to see where they will work as well as they can.
However, the attic is not the ideal place for this device because extreme temperatures and distance will impact its performance.
If you have already placed your wireless router in your attic, you might want to consider putting it somewhere else for the following reasons:
Low Performance
While it might seem great to put your wireless router in your attic, you will soon find that the signal is poor when you are anywhere else in the house. This is because of the insulation in your attic.
Attic insulation ensures that you can heat your house appropriately in the winter and keep it cool during summer.
You might consider just removing this insulation, but doing so would also negatively affect your router’s performance as you would expose the electronic device to extreme temperatures.
You might get decent signal strength if you happen to be right under the attic. But it would be better if you took the wireless router from the attic and put it in the room below.
Extreme Temperatures
As stated above, extreme temperatures typical to attic spaces can be detrimental to your router’s performance.
Even with insulation and ventilation, attics can get extremely cold and hot depending on the weather outside. Your router was not designed for such wide temperature fluctuations. Sure, it might sustain those temperatures for a while, but it is bound to fail sooner or later.
If you want your router to last as long as possible, the attic is not the ideal place for it.
Safety
You might not think that attics are unsafe, but plenty of accidents happen in and near attics on a yearly basis.
According to the US Department of Labor, common attic accidents include falling through the floor in an attic, electrocution, and falling while climbing the stairs or ladder to the attic.
Putting your wireless router somewhere other than the attic will help you avoid these dangers.
Is There a Good Reason to Place a Router in the Attic?
The only real reason to have your wireless router in the attic is if you are going to live or work there.
Plenty of people choose to turn their attics into living spaces and offices. This makes sense when you don’t need the attic for storage. You might also turn your attic into a studio or a home office.
In these situations, and with adequate temperature control, having your wireless router in the attic can be beneficial.
You should place your wireless router in a room that is located in the center of the house. This will ensure that you and everyone else in the home can get a strong signal from the router.
If you do this and some rooms get a poor signal, you can try using a wireless repeater.
A wireless repeater receives your Wi-Fi signal and produces a new Wi-Fi network from it. This cost-effective choice will only run you anywhere from $15 to $20, depending on the brand and quality.
You can even choose to install several wireless repeaters all over the house to ensure that everyone gets a good WiFi connection.
Granted, these devices do not provide the same speed or reliability as being right next to or close to a wireless router. But they are effective, cheap, and easy to install.
Conclusion
Putting your wireless router in the attic is usually not a good idea. Its performance will be limited throughout the rest house, it will have to endure harsh conditions it wasn’t designed for, and you might have an accident while trying to access it.
Unless you live in or work from the attic, there are more ideal places for your router, such as a central bedroom where the router can provide better Wi-Fi coverage.
