Mirrors are helpful and not just for vanity. A well-placed mirror can easily improve the ambiance of a room and make it seem more spacious. Mirrors can also add elegance and class to otherwise bland surroundings. But can a mirror have another unforeseen impact, whether good or bad? There are some effects that a mirror can have that we don’t often think of, like if mirrors affect WiFi signals.
Mirrors can affect WiFi signals in both a bad and a good way. The thick metal coating that makes a mirror reflective also absorbs WiFi’s electromagnetic signals. A mirror can cause a WiFi blackspot, but a well-placed mirror can also re-route WiFi from unused areas to improve the signal elsewhere.
Numerous things in or around homes and offices could adversely affect your WiFi signal. These include drywall, tinted glass, chicken wire, and even water, as surprising as that may be. Mirrors are one of the most common culprits that cause WiFi blackspots. But that can easily be turned around and used to your advantage. Let’s examine why mirrors can affect your WiFi signal.
Why Do Mirrors Affect WiFi Signal?
Strangely enough, it’s not the reflective nature of a mirror that blocks a WiFi signal. It’s not the glass either, since glass has minimal effect on radio waves, and WiFi signals can pass quite easily through windows or any other glass surfaces. In fact, it is the material used to make the mirror reflective that has the most significant impact on your WiFi.
Since older mirrors have actual lead or silver backing, one of these mirrors could effectively stop WiFi signals from passing completely, leading to WiFi blackspots and weak reception areas. More modern mirrors usually don’t contain lead or silver anymore. They use special paint that often contains aluminum, which has less of an adverse effect on WiFi signals.
How Badly Can A Mirror Affect WiFi Signal?
The severity of a mirror’s effect on WiFi signal depends on the age of the mirror, the materials used to manufacture it, and its positioning. The glass itself should have little to no effect on WiFi signal, but as already mentioned, the reflective coating can influence it considerably.
Many users and testers have found that an older mirror with a silver or lead back coating positioned between you and your WiFi router or access point could reduce your WiFi signal strength by as much as 50%. Two of these mirrors in the path of your signal could reduce it to zero. Modern mirrors rarely have this problem, affecting WiFi less than other common materials, like drywall.
Why Does It Seem Like Mirrors Affect WiFi More Severely?
One of the most common locations for mirrors are bathrooms, and the bathroom is also notoriously one of the areas with the worst WiFi signal in any building. Whatever your reasons for requiring WiFi in the bathroom, most of us have experienced the frustration of being in there and unable to get proper internet speed due to weak WiFi signals.
First, bathroom walls are full of pipes running around all over the place. These pipes are often made of cast-iron, a dense metal that will not allow WiFi signals to pass easily. Furthermore, these cast-iron pipes are filled with water which is another potent, if lesser-known, WiFi killer. Due to all the pipes, bathroom walls are usually built very thick and solid, allowing even less WiFi signal to cross.
Now we can add tiles to that equation. Tiles themselves are often highly reflective and may or may not have much of an impact, depending on the material the tile is made of. But tile glue or tile cement can be very dense, creating an additional layer of thick material between the already dense wall and the tiles.
With all this opposition, it’s quite an achievement for any stray bit of WiFi signal to make it to the phone or device that’s in the bathroom with you. The fact that there is a mirror or two in there as well should be the least of your worries. It is definitely not the mirror’s fault that your memes are loading so slowly.
Using Mirrors To Improve WiFi Signal
It’s been proven that modern mirrors can actually improve WiFi signals. Note that the mirror does not amplify the signal at all, but it can re-route it.
That’s exactly what you can do if you have a modern mirror. Suppose there’s an area in your home or office that doesn’t require a WiFi signal. In that case, you can place a mirror between the router and that area to reflect some of the signals in the opposite direction, improving the signal quality in that area. You can reflect the signal towards a previous blackspot with some clever positioning.
Keep in mind that the improvement you get from this will be marginal. It really depends on the mirror, the material it was made of, and how dense the aluminum particles in the paint are. Aluminum reflects electromagnetic waves, so the more aluminum there is, the better it will reflect the WiFi signal.
The other important factor to keep in mind is that distance is detrimental to WiFi signals. They can only travel so far, so reflecting them back with a mirror has a limited effect. If you can concentrate the stray signals more by using more than one mirror, you can increase that distance and have a more significant impact on your WiFi signal strength.
So Are Mirrors Really A Problem For WiFi?
Modern WiFi was designed to compensate for various standard household features and furniture. There are different frequencies, and some are more potent at penetrating through dense materials than others. Yes, almost anything that sits between you and the router will affect the strength of your signal. But in the end, very few things on their own will disrupt it completely.
Conclusion
Mirrors can affect WiFi signals in both a positive and a negative way. The severity of the impact is negligible and usually not worth the effort of bothering yourself with it. But in rare cases, moving a mirror can have some benefit, and often even a little bit of improvement can make a significant difference. Go ahead and experiment. Just maybe your mirror has a substantial effect on your WiFi.
