Reefkeepers may be dismayed to learn that one of the things weakening their home Wi-Fi signal is actually their tank, and just when they need a good signal to control many smart aquarium devices. Wi-Fi is affected by many things around the home – brick walls, mirrors, microwave ovens, and sadly, fish tanks, as water is a conductor of electricity, meaning that water has the ability to absorb the Wi-Fi signal. In addition, water reflects and refracts sound waves, causing them to take longer to travel between your connected devices and the wireless router (and vice versa). Add the electrical cables and equipment that actually power our tanks, and a reef aquarium can cause a large shadow in our signal. It acts like a barrier.
Many of us, (ourselves included,) are guilty of positioning routers near to or even next to our aquariums in the hope of better signal to our Wi-Fi enabled devices, but if we have the router on one side of the fish tank and the device on the other, we may actually be doing more harm than good. Try hard-wiring monitors and controllers with an ethernet cable wherever possible. And if your LFS has a poor Wi-Fi signal, now you’ll know why.
