In April of 2015 we moved into our new house and were pretty naive to think that our technology that we used in our 2000 square foot three story townhouse would suffice for our three story 5,600 square foot home. We installed the router that we had been using for years at the townhouse which was an Apple Timecapsule. We started noticing issues almost immediately. At the townhouse the router was located on the middle level in the very center of the building but at the new house the router has to be poorly positioned in the closet of one of the upstairs bedrooms. It also didn’t help that our home office is located in the basement. We started to routinely head upstairs to reset the modem and the router. We’d have company over and the wifi would crash. I’d be uploading hi-res pictures for my photography business and everything would come to a screeching halt. The old router that work perfectly fine when perfectly positioned in a smaller house was not going to cut it for our new home and my business.
I put my husband to work to find us a solution. Being a software engineer and a pretty big techie I thought he’d be able to handle the situation with ease. After a little bit of research he bought and installed a new top of the line router, D-Link AC3200, which was supposed to end all our wifi nightmares. The router definitely performed better than the Apple Timecapsule but we still found ourselves heading upstairs to reset the modem and router. We were pretty frustrated considering the cost of the new equipment. Unfortunately for us we had not found out about eero yet so we tried to put some Apple Expresses into our Wifi network to extend the signal. These actually ended up being pretty difficult to configure and created some odd issues where some of our devices would fail to connect to the network even with the correct credentials, we ended up having to return the devices because they ended up causing us even more headaches.
After spending hundreds of dollars trying to create a solid Wifi network for our home and home business we started to feel like we were either going to have to live with poor Wifi or hire someone to come out and professionally install some kind of solution. My husband then stumbled upon eero.com and we started debating spending additional money to solve our problem. We decided to give eero a try**.
About eero
In case you haven’t heard of eero. It’s a wifi system (basically a system of routers). The system links together through out your house. The whole system is super easy to set up. Check out eero’s video for a more detailed explanation.
Life After eero
When the package of our three eeros showed up my husband said “we are probably going be returning theses”. My husband and I opened the box and were a little discouraged when it read that it was recommended to have 1 eero for every 1000 square feet of your house, so we are about 2 and half eeros short of what is recommended. But we really didn’t have anything to lose so we began our installation. I can honestly say it was the easiest router I have ever had to install. All you really have to do is plug it in and pull up the iPhone app. There are not very many options during the router setup so things do not get very complicated. One down side to the eero is that there are only two ethernet ports so we had to buy a switch, TP-Link TL-SG1008D, to handle our SmartThings hub, Philips Hue hub, and DirecTv home system. It literally only took 30 minutes to install all three eeros and reconnect all our additional hubs. The only hiccup was reconfiguring our Sonos speaker systems which pretty much required us setting up each speaker like it was the first time connected to the network. This was definitely no fault to eero and may actually been solved easily if we owned a Sonos Boost.
After two weeks of use we have not had to go upstairs once to restart a router or the modem. The wifi has not gone down a single time. I had my husband walk around the house and our yard to test the signal strength of our new Wifi. It was not surprising to us that it worked well in the areas that we are in the most but it failed to perform well in some corners of our house and our yard based on the initial recommendation of one eero for every 1000 square feet. We have little doubt that if we had two or three more that it would work well in all corners of the house and that my husband might actually be able to listen to internet radio over the network while mowing the lawn.
eero Review Recap
Overall I would definitely recommend this product to anyone who is either tired of the complicated options of setting up a home network or for someone who is struggling with Wifi signal in a large space. If have tried a different router with no luck this is a great option for more compliated setups or larger homes. The only downside to this product that we saw is that there is a very limited number of ethernet ports (2) but this problem can be easily fixed by purchasing a switch (in our case we bought the TP-Link TL-SG1008D for $25). Besides that the only other negative we saw is that you have to purchase one unit for every 1000 sq feet you want to cover. This can get a little costly, but for us this investment is well worth the cost.
**Disclamer: eero provided us a 3-pack unit for this review. That being said this review is an honest and fair evaluation of the product.
Leave a Reply