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Tried a wireless alarm panel in an old farmhouse last Tuesday and learned a hard lesson about plaster and lathe walls
Spent 3 hours mounting and testing everything, only to have the whole system lose signal every time someone walked into the kitchen. Turns out the old plaster with metal mesh basically blocks wireless signals like a Faraday cage. Anyone else run into trouble with older construction that made you rethink using wireless panels?
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margaret3041mo ago
My first wireless install was in a 1920s house with horsehair plaster and I spent four full days chasing dead zones before I realized the walls themselves were the problem. I actually left a wireless receiver in the attic and had to crawl back up there three times before I gave up and ran a wire. The metal lath in those old walls is basically a signal killer, and I learned that lesson the hard way after my customer's alarm kept going off every time someone opened the microwave. Did you end up having to switch to a wired panel or find some kind of workaround?
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angelar571mo ago
And I left a wireless receiver in the attic and had to crawl back up there three times" - oh man, that is exactly the kind of mistake I would make too, @danielw88. I once put a router in a crawlspace and spent two hours wondering why my phone wouldn't connect (spoiler: I forgot to turn it on).
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Had a buddy who tried installing a wireless system in his 1890s farmhouse and gave up after the third false alarm from his wood stove. He said every time the stove's blower kicked on, the panel lost connection to two of his window sensors and he couldn't figure out why for like a month. Ended up running a single Cat5 cable through the attic to his main hub and it fixed everything, but he still jokes about how those old walls basically turned his house into a giant signal jammer lol.
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