Time and Time again I am having trouble on Connecting a New Controller RACHIO 2 to Wifi in Locations far away from the Wifi router.
Can anybody suggest the best Wifi extender to use?
Scenario ( Replacing Existing controllers in Garages and the wifi in the home doesn’t quite reach the controller, it would not make sense to reroute the wiring closer to the house)
@DirectIRG - Best???
Best is what works in the specific situation.
I know that Rachio doesn’t recommend extenders.
I’m not affiliated with Rachio so don’t call into support and blame me if it doesn’t work. Post here and we’ll try to figure it out.
My personal installation has a D-Link DAP1330 network extender to reach my Rachio (yes, it worked on a Gen 2). I have it advertise a different SSID than the network it is extending. That way there is no confusion to what device I’m connecting to and no thrashing back and forth trying to connect to an access point that is too far away.
If more distance from the base WiFi is needed then I’ve recommended Powerline Ethernet that has WiFi broadcasting from the far side. Such as:
https://www.netgear.com/home/products/networking/powerline/default.aspx
I’ve used this one: https://www.netgear.com/home/products/networking/powerline/PLW1000.aspx
with good results in a non-Rachio situation.
Hope this helps.
As always YMMV.
Welcome to the community.
I just bought a RockSpace extender to get a better signal in my garage. Doesn’t look like it let’s me change the ssid from myssid, it assigns myssid_ext. My phone needs to be on the same network, right? So if I reboot the Rachio so the _ext is used, I’ll need to log into it first, right?