Block walls and lanais: the Florida house playbook

Our bench is in Central Florida, which means a disproportionate share of our installs are concrete block stucco — CBS construction, the default here since the 1960s. Block houses are wonderful in a hurricane and miserable for WiFi, and most generic coverage advice quietly assumes drywall. Here's the local playbook.

What block actually does to your signal

A drywall interior wall costs a WiFi signal almost nothing. An 8-inch filled block wall can knock down 5 GHz hard enough that "two rooms away" behaves like "next door's house," and the 6 GHz band WiFi 7 brings is even less forgiving — higher frequencies penetrate worse, full stop. The practical translation: count every block wall as roughly doubling the distance between the AP and the device behind it.

The Florida sizing rules

• Take the normal estimate and add one AP. Our coverage planner already applies a construction multiplier when you tell it block/brick — if you're doing napkin math instead, the standard rules minus one leap of optimism.
• Put APs inside the room they serve, not in the hall. In a drywall house, a central hallway AP serves the bedrooms around it. With block interior walls (common in older CBS homes), each cluster of rooms wants its own radio with line of sight.
• The garage is a Faraday cage. Block on all sides plus a metal door. If the garage needs coverage — openers, EV charger, freezer sensor — give it its own cheap AP (U7 Lite, $125) rather than hoping.

The lanai problem

Every Florida house has the same dead zone: the screened lanai, separated from the living room AP by — you guessed it — a block exterior wall. The fix is not turning up power on the indoor AP; it's an outdoor radio on the right side of the concrete. The U7 Pro Outdoor ($349) mounts under the eave or on the lanai header, shrugs off the humidity, and covers lanai, pool deck and the start of the yard in one go. Run the cable through the soffit; it's a 30-minute attic job in most single-story CBS homes.

While you're in the attic

Florida attics are brutal in July but they're also a single-story highway to every ceiling in the house. If you're paying anyone (including yourself in sweat) to go up there once, pull every run you'll ever want in the same trip — AP drops, camera drops at the eave corners, the doorbell. Cable is cheap; the second attic trip never happens.

Cameras, since you're outside anyway

Eave-mounted cameras and the outdoor AP share the same attic cable runs. The G6 Turret ($249) under the front eave and a G6 Bullet ($249) watching the driveway is the standard Florida four-corner start — the camera system guide covers the recorder side.

If this sounds like your house, it sounds like our Tuesday. Send the floor plan — block walls and all — and an installer who's met Florida concrete will spec it for free.

Prices current at publication.