How best (that is, cheapest & easiest) to get wifi to a chicken coop?

We have a chicken coop about 200 ft from the nearest corner of our house. We moved it there last spring and expanded it. Over the previous winter, it had been tucked in next to our house and we put in several Wyze Cams to keep an eye on the goings-on inside the coop and the nesting boxes. But the new location is too far from the house to get a wifi signal.

We ran power out to the coop, at last, to keep their drinking water heater going in the winter, to keep a timer-run light in the coop on, and to power the electric fence around their yard (it’s pretty wild here and we get foxes and bears and such). I had hoped to run the Wyze Cams again, but I’ve been unable to get them to link up to our wifi.

I’ve tried:

  • setting up an older (ca. 2015) Asus router in the nearest house window and having it repeat the signal from our main house wifi. No dice.
  • replacing one of the Asus router’s 3 screw-in antennas with a directional (but still small) antenna. No dice.
  • setting up a TP-Link nano router out at the coop itself as a second repeater for the network, piggy-backing off of the Asus. No dice.

I’m willing to entertain additional options. My preferences:

  • wireless, not wired; I don’t want to run ANOTHER buried line out there
  • unobtrusive; the closest point of the house is the front corner, which is what everyone sees when they pull up. I’d rather not have a giant weird Yagi antenna or something hanging off the side of the house. (We can, however, have a weird antenna hanging off the coop.)
  • cheap; I’d rather not spend more than an additional $50 on what is already an expensive hobby (chicken-raising)

Thanks for the advice.

Have you considered …

Are the additional routers truly repeating the wifi signal, or are they separate wifi networks?

Actually, I think he wants the opposite, Ethernet over power. Or more specifically called powerline adapters. You can plug “powerline adapter” into amazon.com for options.

Yes, you are correct. I do not want to run any additional cable.

I’ll check the powerline adapters; I thought they didn’t play well over different circuits (and the coop electric runs off an external subpanel, which is run from a circuit on a subpanel next to the main panel in our basement).

Aw, too bad. Yes, they’d have to be the same circuit.

Well, it’s not a mesh system; I have the Asus creating a new network (let’s call the SSID “repeater-net”) based on the main home wifi and the TP-Link running in repeater mode with all of the settings and SSID of the Asus “repeater-net”.

I’m able to get onto each (and connect out to the internet) from my iPhone, but the Wyze Cams won’t connect. I was able to bring them into the house next to the Asus and connect them to the “repeater-net” successfully, but when I took them back out, the connection for them failed.

I also experimented by setting up the TP-Link out at the external breaker panel (it’s on a post outside the electric fence, and is closer/with a clearer line of sight to the house than the part of the coop where the cams normally live) and also powering up a cam right next to it; the cam worked, but only very tentatively—low throughput and connection occasionally stuttering to 0 kb/s).

Sounds like it’s more of an issue of getting the Wyze cams to work correctly than getting wifi out there? I mean, if your phone connects to the wifi fine at the coop, then there’s wifi at the coop.

My question was just the first step in checking whether the device you were trying to interact with the Wyze cameras with was on the same network, but it sounds like you’ve ensured that they were, and then the Wyze cameras still had issues.

It seems like you need to figure out what the Wyze requirements are for a stable connection.

ETA: I would not call a separate network that is connected to a router a repeater. It’s a separate network. If you’re trying to view the Wyze cams on, say, a computer that’s connected to your house router, it’s unlikely to be able to access cams connected to the coop (ASUS) network.

I could be wrong, but I don’t think he was trying at the coop.

Toadspittle, Would this be too ugly on your house?

Link to Outdoor wifi antenna

I’m relieved to read the OP and see that it’s not the chickens who want the wifi.

If that’s the case, I’d suggest that @toadspittle try connecting to the wifi via their phone, at the coop, just to confirm where the problem lies.

I was connecting on my iPhone at the coop. My guess is that the iPhone has a far better antenna than the Wyze cams, and can grab the (admittedly weaker-than-liked) signal better than the Wyze cams can.

It’s all compounded by how the Wyze cams appear to work: You access them through an app on your phone, and you don’t specify the network they should use in any way; they apparently just look for the wifi network that your phone is currently using, and then stay on that network after you go away. (For example, in the past I set them up while my iPhone was on our home network, then was able to open the app when I was out of town and look at the livestream.)

Toadspittle, Would this be too ugly on your house?

Link to Outdoor wifi antenna

I don’t think I would want that on my house, but I’d be fine with that out at the coop. I might be able to put the Asus router in the coop (there’s a sheltered storage area where I have the other electrics) and mount this antenna on the outside, aimed back at the house. A number of the reviews for the antenna indicate similar applications (putting a router + the antenna in a work shop, etc., and aiming the antenna back at the house to grab wifi).

Doesn’t your ASUS router have to have a wired connection? I may be confused by the terminology you are using.

Why shouldn’t chickens have wi-fi?

They might get to the other…site?

Thread winner!

No, the Asus router can connect wirelessly to the house wifi (broadcast by my cable company’s router) and rebroadcast it as a wifi repeater/bridge. That’s what it’s been doing so far; I’d just be moving the Asus router farther from the house source wifi signal and closer to the coop’s Wyze cams

Why not run a co-ax cable out to the coop and attach the two routers together? I took a 100m co-ax and did that to a detached garage. I used the same conduit which carried the electricity to the garage.

You are correct. My mistake.