u/Chance-Jellyfish-302

Finally decided to upgrade from the ISP’s wireless router at my crash pad.

For those of you who do not know what a crash pad is… it is a place I stay at during the work week instead of my actual home (which is a 40 minute flight or a 5 hour drive away).

I bought a 3pk of these for my house in January. They all have a wired backhaul. I was very impressed.

For the last year and a half, I’ve just been dealing with the Nokia wireless router that I got from T-Mobile Fiber at my crash pad. The router was set up in the basement where the fiber comes in. But I always had crappy WiFi in my 2nd floor bedroom. I got by for awhile with a cheap 100Mbps Netgear WiFi extender. But I figured it was time.

Since I already knew how to set everything up, it was a breeze. You can set up more than one network in the Asus WiFi app. So that was convenient.

I put one BD5 in the basement, and one BD5 in my room with a wired backhaul. They both work like a charm.

The only bummer is they only have two Ethernet ports each. So I had to cough up an extra $20 for an 8 port unmanaged gigabit network switch. I only pay for symmetrical 550Mbps. So this switch works perfectly.

A few years ago, I bought two brand new Yale smart deadbolts that have mostly worked fine over the years. But they’ve also shown their Achilles heel. They use replaceable AAA batteries. So the conductors have worn to a point where the locks don’t automatically come to life when I put in freshly charged batteries. And the bridges do not reliably connect to my WiFi anymore.

So after careful consideration, and about a dozen or so questions to ChatGPT, I decided on two of these kits. Not what I wanted to spend $600 on right now. But I’ve been dealing with unreliable smart locks for at least the past year.

Seeing a Facebook ad about the Wyze Palm Lock is what got me re-motivated to look for new door locks. The Wyze lock looks pretty good in its own right. But I went with this one for some extra features. And it’s a lot more sleek and minimalistic.