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Hardwired beat wireless hands down on a 3-story office I did last month | Alarm System Installers - Vivisector

Hardwired beat wireless hands down on a 3-story office I did last month

I compared a full Honeywell hardwired setup against a wireless Vista system on a retrofit job in downtown Austin. The wireless kept dropping sensors on the top floor because of all the metal studs, but the hardwired ran clean after one 8-hour day. Has anyone else had signal issues with wireless in commercial steel buildings?

3 comments

3 Comments

gavin_kim3mo ago

Man oh man, yeah that metal stud nightmare is real. I've seen it happen a bunch on commercial jobs where they use those steel studs for everything. The wireless signal just bounces around weirdly or gets swallowed up by all that metal framing. It's not even a distance thing sometimes, the metal just acts like a big cage. Hardwired is a pain to pull sometimes but at least you know every connection is solid and not fighting physics. I've started telling people upfront if they want wireless in a steel building they better plan on repeaters or accept some dead zones. The stability of hardwire in those environments is just unbeatable once you get the wires run.

kai_burns733mo ago

Respectfully, I actually think wireless has come far enough in the last few years that a good mesh system handles steel framing way better than people give it credit for. It's not perfect but with modern tri-band routers positioned correctly you can get surprisingly solid coverage through metal studs without needing a dozen repeaters. Maybe it's just about picking the right gear and placement though, not the whole approach itself.

wilson.olivia3mo ago

My buddy who does commercial AV in Houston tried a wireless system in a steel-frame church and spent three weekends moving receivers around before giving up. He said the metal framing basically turned the whole building into a giant RF tunnel and the signals just couldn't punch through right. After he finally ran hardwire on that job it worked perfect and he swears he'll never try wireless in a steel building again.