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Spent $210 on a name brand wireless kit for a rental, and the $40 wired one from the hardware store did the same job
Six months ago I took a small job on a two bedroom rental over in Boise. Landlord just wanted basic door and window coverage, nothing fancy. I told him we should go wireless so we would not have to fish wire through the old plaster. He agreed, so I picked up a name brand wireless kit for around $210 with the hub, sensors, and a keypad. Two weeks later the tenant called me because two sensors kept showing as open when they were shut, and one of them ate a battery in under a month. I went back out, swapped the batteries, moved the hub, and it still acted up whenever the microwave ran. Out of frustration I pulled the whole thing and put in a plain wired panel and contacts from the hardware store, about $40 total for that little house. It has run clean for five months now with zero callbacks. The part that bugs me is I sold the landlord on wireless like it was the only real choice, and I never even asked how the walls were framed. Has anyone else gotten burned on a wireless kit and just gone back to hardwiring the small stuff?
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the_sam15d ago
The part about the microwave messing with the signal is the piece nobody talks about when they sell you these kits. People blame the brand or the hub placement, but a lot of the time it comes down to what is inside the walls, not just how they are framed. Old plaster and lath with metal mesh behind it acts like a cage, and that mesh was put in a lot of those Boise houses from the 40s and 50s. Even without the mesh, a fridge or microwave sitting between the sensor and the hub can stomp on the signal on the cheaper bands. So you did not just pick the wrong product, you were fighting the building itself and nobody warns you about that at the counter. Wired does not care about any of it, which is why it just worked once you stopped swimming upstream. The lesson I take from it is to ask about what is behind the walls before I ever pitch wireless, not after.
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