I have a key for a neighbour’s house, and when they go away I put in some battery-powered Blink cameras covering their three doors, and set the cameras to Motion Detect. By live-viewing the cameras I can see, e.g if they have had any post, or if they’ve had a power cut (they have a couple of fridge freezers) or if any breakers have tripped.
So, they went away this weekend, and I installed the cameras as normal. What was not normal was that they couldn’t connect to my Blink network. Slightly puzzled by this as it’s never happened before, I substituted some Blink Minicams for the battery ones, but they didn’t connect either. I went home and tried moving the Sync Module to different places, but that had no effect.
Puzzled by this, I checked again, and my WiFi network also isn’t visible in my neighbour’s house. Going back home, my neighbour’s WiFi signal isn’t visible in my house. Neither is that of my other neighbour, or those networks of their neighbours. No networks from across the little valley are visible either. Normally I can see all these, but now I can’t. What could have happened to reduce everyone’s WiFi signal?
The likely answer is forty days of rain. The brick walls of the houses are saturated with water, there has essentially been no sun or drying wind to take away the moisture.
AI suggests that a 2.5GHz signal suffers 5dB attenuation through a brick wall, but this might be 15dB for a saturated wall. Given there’s two such walls involved, the signal could have been attenuated by an extra 20dB, and this could account for why WiFi signals aren’t propagating as normal outside the walls of the houses. Our external Blink cameras are working as normal, but are close to the house and the signals have only one wet wall to traverse.
Let’s see what happens as the walls dry out.