How to get WiFi in a garden room

Whether you’re using a garden room as a home office, entertainment space or teen den having good WiFi connectivity is key to being able to use and enjoy your space as intended. Nobody wants to freeze mid video call, spend hours buffering or miss that winning goal when live streaming. So, how do you ensure you can obtain wifi in a garden room?

There are three different ways you can achieve getting WiFi in a garden room. In the blog we’re going to explore them in more detail to help you find the best solution!

1. Hard wired ethernet cable

2. Homeplugs

3. Mesh Network

Why won’t my existing WiFi work in my garden room?

Typically when within our homes we connect to the internet via a WiFi router. However, garden rooms tend to be far away from the house and even further from the location of the router, so the issue most people find is that the signal strength isn’t strong enough to reach the garden room. That’s where our different solutions come in to ensure you can connect to the internet within your new space!

Find the right WiFi solution for your garden room

1. Hard wired ethernet cable

For a hard wired solution, an ethernet socket can be installed in the house next to the existing router and a long armoured CAT6 cable is run to your garden room. When the cable reaches the room it will be hard wired to an ethernet socket installed by our team. You can then plug an ethernet cable into this and into devices such as computers and laptops to connect to the internet.

This cable doesn’t however give you a wireless WiFi network in your building. For this you will need to purchase a standalone wireless router which you can then wirelessly connect devices like smart speakers, TV’s and printers.

Pros:

• The CAT6 cable running from the house to garden room supports gigabit speeds, which is as fast as most available broadbands currently offered.

Cons:

• More expensive to install
• It can be tricky to run the cable in certain property types. It is much easier on detached houses as running it through the house requires trunking to hide the cable.

Cost:

• The average cost of a full connection is between £1500 and £1800, depending on the length of cable needed to the garden room. We will quote for this at your free design consultation.

2. Homeplugs

The homeplug WiFi solution involves sending the internet through the power network of your home and replicating it in your garden building. Working in about 95% of our customers homes it is relatively simple to set up involving connecting the two plugs that we provide.

The first plug is plugged into a socket near the router in your house and the short patch cable included is connected into the router. The second plug is plugged into one of the sockets of your garden room and provides a wireless network in the building to connect your devices to.

Pros:

• The home network can be expanded at any time with additional adapters throughout other parts of your home
• Most cost effective solution

Cons:

• Isn’t guaranteed to work in all homes
• The internet speed can sometimes run slower than hardwired due to interference throughout the electrical network

Cost:

• £90 for the two homeplugs

3. Mesh Network

We do not currently offer the installation of mesh networks, however we do get lots of questions on them so wanted to share how they work.

Mesh WiFi works by using two or more devices called ‘nodes’ to create a secure network throughout your home and to your garden building. Placing them in a sequence from the position of your modem, with the last one in the garden building, they work together to blanket your house and garden room in WiFi.

What’s great is as you roam from room to room, your devices will automatically connect to the strongest signal detected, which means no having to switch to different networks.

Pros:

• Can build a strong network in your house and garden room.

Cons:

• They do have a distance limitation, potentially meaning needing more nodes in the house depending on the location of your modem
• If the garden building is more than 30 metres from the house the mesh network will be too far away to work
• Would have to independently source and install

Cost:

• Around £160 – £200 for a set of three devices (we like these from Amazon) but will vary depending on brand and desired specification.

Have more questions?

CONTACT A MEMBER OF OUR DESIGN TEAM

Get in touch with our sales and design team to discuss getting WiFi in your garden room or with any other project queries! 

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