Drawing Your Floor Plan in Range Up Without Measuring Anything

You can draw a floor plan for a Wi-Fi app without a tape measure. A coverage simulation needs the path between the router and the failing room: walls, doors, major obstructions and roughly consistent distance. It does not care whether a living room is 14 or 15 feet long.

Range Up uses one grid cell as roughly one meter (three feet three inches). Pace the home, preserve proportions, and spend the saved time on the wall types that actually change signal. The result is reliable enough to decide where a router, extender or mesh node belongs.

Size the grid and pace the outline#

A blank plan is 12–60 cells wide and 10–50 cells high. A two-bedroom apartment commonly fits around 13 by 9 cells; a four-bedroom house may need about 18 by 13. Let the outline fill most of the grid with a cell or two of margin. A plan squashed into a corner gives the placement search fewer useful candidate tiles.

Use ordinary walking steps for long runs: four relaxed steps are about 10 feet, or three cells. For a small room or hallway, heel-to-toe steps are close enough. Familiar objects are useful sanity checks:

For a house with multiple stories, choose dimensions for the largest floor; all floors use one shared footprint. The multi-floor guide shows how to stack them.

Prioritize walls over perfect dimensions#

In open air, doubling distance costs about 6 dB. Drawing a 15-foot room three feet wrong usually shifts the prediction by only about a decibel. Missing a wall is much worse: an ordinary partition costs roughly 3–8 dB at 5 GHz, brick 10–16 dB, reinforced concrete 15–25 dB, and mirrors or foil-backed insulation can exceed 20 dB.

The practical priority is therefore:

1. Walls on the direct path from router to problem room, and their global material preset.
2. Doorways, archways and cased openings; they pass far more signal than the wall around them.
3. Relative room sizes. A room twice as deep as its neighbor should be drawn twice as deep.
4. Exact dimensions only when they are easy to obtain.

Read how walls affect Wi-Fi signal before modeling a masonry chimney, tiled shower wall or metal-framed mirror as a normal partition. Set material assumptions in Range Up’s wall-material settings rather than trying to make every room mathematically perfect.

Draw in the order that prevents errors#

Use the three tools — Wall, Door and Erase — in this sequence:

1. Draw the exterior as one closed loop from a corner you can remember.
2. Check its cell count against your paced dimensions before adding details.
3. Add interior walls, longest first, anchoring them from that same corner.
4. Replace wall tiles with Door tiles at every door, archway and open cased opening.
5. Add one wall tile for unusually dense blockers on the signal path: a masonry stack, tiled wet wall, mirrored closet door, appliance bank or water tank.
6. Erase overshoots and stop when the router-to-target path is honest.

Draw shared walls once. Drawing each room as its own box doubles the common wall and can add 6–16 dB of fictional loss. Do not add furniture, rugs, cabinets, room labels or ordinary windows; the simulator has no tile types for them. Add coated or double glazing only when planning coverage beyond the building, because it can cost 10–25 dB.

Know when the sketch is done#

Your plan is ready when the exterior, meaningful interior walls, openings, router and problem spot look proportionally right. It can be uniformly 10–15% small or large; consistent scaling is safer than a beautifully measured living room and compressed bedrooms.

Next, follow the complete Range Up walkthrough, place the router, select a target and read the heatmap bands. A starter layout is useful if your home resembles one, but still edit walls and openings that differ. You can then download Range Up or review the broader extender-placement plan.

Correct only what changes the answer.

Do a quick path audit before advancing: trace a straight line from router to target and count the walls and openings it crosses. If the line passes through a doorway in real life, use a Door tile; if it cuts through a fireplace, tiled shower stack or mirrored wardrobe, do not quietly treat it as open floor. These few corrections are what make a small sketch useful.

Do not overfit the drawing to temporary details. A sofa moves, a door may be open or closed, and a phone is carried around; the building path is the stable fact. If a result changes dramatically when you add one wall, use that as a signal to check the construction and positioning in person. It is better to compare a plausible Wood frame and Brick setting than to claim a single hand-drawn number is exact.

For angled or curved walls, approximate the barrier with a short run of wall tiles that preserves the router-to-room path and the doorway. A slightly stepped outline is acceptable; double-thick walls and invented interior partitions are not. You can always revise the local draft after testing a candidate.