Mapping a Multi-Floor Home in Range Up
Build a multi floor wifi map that you can trust: setting the floor count, keeping floors aligned, modeling the stairwell honestly, and reading the 3D stack.
A single-floor plan is a map. A two- or three-floor plan is a stack, and the stack is where most home Wi-Fi complaints actually live: the router is downstairs, the problem is a back bedroom two floors up, and the path between them runs through joists, a bathroom and a staircase.
Range Up holds up to five floors in one plan. Here is how to set them up so the answer is worth trusting — floor count, alignment, stairs, and what the 3D view is and is not telling you.
What changes when you add a floor#
A floor is not just another wall. Crossing one timber floor with joists typically costs 6 to 12 dB; a reinforced concrete slab is more like 15 to 25 dB. Range Up models this as a single per-floor penalty for the whole plan, defaulting to 14 dB and adjustable from 8 to 30 dB.
Two consequences before you draw anything:
- One timber floor costs about as much as two or three interior stud walls. That is why the room directly above the router is often weaker than a room at the far end of the same floor.
- The shortest path is frequently not the vertical one. Signal that goes up a stairwell and across a landing can beat signal punched through a slab. That is geometry, and geometry is what a floor plan is good at.
This article is about building the model. What to do with the answer belongs to the two-story placement guide.
Set the floor count, then keep the floors aligned#
Set the count before you draw#
The floor count is part of creating the plan, not an afterthought. From New plan, pick Blank plan; the size sheet asks for width in cells, height in cells, and floors. Width accepts 12 to 60 cells, height 10 to 50, and you can stack up to 5 floors. Starter layouts include two-floor options if you would rather adapt one.
Three rules for that sheet:
- Size the grid to your largest floor. Every floor shares one footprint, so the ground floor of a house with a smaller upper story sets the dimensions.
- Set the real number of floors now. You can remove a floor later, but everything above it shifts down by one and anything placed on it goes with it.
- Do not shrink the grid for a smaller upper floor. Draw that floor's exterior wall where it really is and ignore the leftover squares beyond it — that area is outside the house.
One grid square is about a yard, but consistency beats the absolute number: the same real wall should occupy the same squares on every floor. Pacing out proportions without a tape measure is covered in drawing your floor plan.
Floors share one footprint, so alignment is free#
Every floor uses the same grid and the same coordinates. The square at column 12, row 8 on Floor 1 sits directly underneath column 12, row 8 on Floor 2. You never align floors manually, because they arrive aligned — and that gives the router downstairs and the bedroom upstairs a real three-dimensional relationship.
What it demands is discipline while drawing. The most common multi-floor mistake is sketching the upper floor as its own little picture — shifted a few squares, rotated, or started from a different corner. The rooms still look right, and every vertical distance in the model is now wrong. A node the app recommends on the landing turns out, in reality, to be above the bathroom.
The reliable method:
- Draw Floor 1 completely — exterior outline, then interior walls, then doors.
- Switch to Floor 2 with the floor chips and redraw the same exterior outline on the same squares, from the same corner.
- Only then add the upper-floor interior walls.
Anchor on the exterior corners and the stairwell. If those line up between floors, small errors elsewhere will not move the recommendation.
How to model a stairwell#
Range Up draws three kinds of tile — open floor, wall, and door. There is no stairs tile, and floor-to-floor loss is applied evenly across the plan rather than punched as a hole at the opening. So you model a stairwell in two moves.
Leave the opening as open space on both floors. Do not wall off the landing or fill in the squares above the stair run. The horizontal part of a cross-floor path is traced through the walls you drew, so a clear route to and from the stair area is what makes a landing position look as good as it really is. If a real door sits at the top of the stairs, draw it as a door tile, not a wall — a door costs a small fraction of a wall, in the model and in the house.
Then tell the app what your floors are made of. Planner Settings holds one Material preset for the whole plan, and each choice fills in floor loss along with wall and door loss:
| Preset | Wall loss | Door loss | Floor loss | Fits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wood frame | 3 dB | 1 dB | 13 dB | Wood joists, stud partitions, most US houses |
| Brick | 10 dB | 2 dB | 17 dB | Solid interior masonry, older European construction |
| Concrete | 12 dB | 3 dB | 22 dB | Poured slabs, apartment blocks, converted commercial |
The Floor loss slider runs from 8 to 30 dB. Nudge it low for a wide, open, doorless stairwell, because a real share of the energy takes the hole instead of the joists. Push it up for a solid door at the top of the stairs, or a slab.
Reading the 3D stack#
The canvas has a 2D/3D toggle. In 3D, each floor is a stacked slab carrying its own heatmap, top floor at the back. Drag to orbit, pinch to zoom, and tap a floor chip to make that slab active — it brightens while the others dim.
The view answers one question well: does the weak area on one floor sit above or below the weak area on another?
- Weak zones stacked vertically usually share one cause: a masonry chimney, a stacked plumbing wall, a riser, or the far end of a long house.
- Weak zones offset between floors are two separate horizontal problems, each needing its own answer.
- The floor above uniformly one or two bands weaker is normal floor loss. Nothing is broken.
- The floor above dark on one half only is a wall problem up there, and moving something horizontally can fix it.
What 3D is not: extra detail inside a room. Each floor is a flat slab of predicted signal at one height. Tilt nearly flat to compare colors, tilt up for the stacking relationship. The colors themselves are covered in reading the coverage heatmap.
What cross-floor coverage is telling you#
Mark the target location on the floor that has the problem — one room, not the whole upstairs. The search sweeps candidate positions on every floor and ranks them by how much each lifts that spot. That is why it sometimes recommends a node one floor below the room you are fixing: a position with a clean link to the router and one floor to cross often beats a position in the right room with no link worth repeating. A candidate only counts if it can still hear the router — the working window is -60 to -67 dBm, and below about -70 dBm you move it back toward the router, the rule laid out in the backhaul window a repeater needs.
| What the stack shows | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Upper floor one band weaker everywhere | Ordinary floor loss | One node upstairs near the stairs usually clears it |
| Fine near the stairs, dark at both ends | Not the floor; distance and partitions up there | Put the node upstairs, not downstairs |
| Dark even directly above the router | Floor loss is very high — a slab, or a setting too heavy | Check the preset; if it really is concrete, plan a wired drop |
| Floor 3 gray while Floor 2 is orange | One radio is being asked to cross two floors | Two separate hops or a cable. One extender will not do it |
| Same corner dark on every floor | A vertical structure: chimney, masonry core, riser | Route around it horizontally. More power will not help |
| Best candidate lifts the target under 10 dB | Placement is not the constraint | An extender is the wrong purchase |
Take those last two rows seriously. If no candidate on any floor both hears the router well and reaches the dead room, no placement solves your problem — and the map has saved you the price of a device that would have changed nothing. The honest answers are then moving the router, a wired backhaul, or a mesh system planned properly.
Mapping a two-story home, step by step#
- New plan, Blank plan, set grid size. Enter width and height for the larger floor and set Floors to 2.
- Draw Floor 1 completely: exterior outline, interior walls, doors. Leave the stair opening as open floor.
- Switch to F2 and trace the same exterior outline on the same squares, from the same corner.
- Add the upper interior walls. Leave the landing and stair opening open, and place a door tile where a real door sits at the top.
- In Planner Settings, pick the Material preset matching your construction, then adjust Floor loss for your stairwell.
- Place the router where it really is, on the right floor — not in the middle of the room.
- Mark the target location on the floor with the problem.
- Run the placement search, then switch to 3D to check the vertical relationship.
- Compare before and after, and judge it by the change in the target room only.
After the map#
Multi-floor plans and the 3D view are free; the vertical question is the one a flat sketch cannot answer. It all runs on the device: no account, no upload, no Wi-Fi scanning permission, no measurement of your live network. It is a simulation, so once the recommendation looks sensible, put the hardware in and confirm it in the room that made you care. What to do with the result once you have it is set out in our full guide to extender placement, and you can download Range Up to try the stack on your own house.
Frequently asked questions#
How many floors can Range Up map at once?
Up to five floors in a single plan, all sharing one footprint. You set the number when you create the plan, along with the grid width and height.
Do I have to draw every floor separately?
Yes — each floor gets its own walls and doors, because they are genuinely different layouts. What you do not have to do is align them: every floor uses the same grid and the same coordinates, so a square on one floor sits exactly above the same square on the floor below. Trace the same exterior outline on each floor and the alignment takes care of itself.
How do I add stairs to the floor plan?
There is no stairs tile. Model a stairwell by leaving the stair opening and the landing as open floor on both floors, drawing a door tile if a real door sits at the top, and then setting the Floor loss value to reflect how leaky your stairwell is. Floor loss is applied evenly across the plan rather than as a hole at the opening.
How much Wi-Fi signal do you lose going through a floor?
As a rule of thumb, one timber floor with joists costs around 6 to 12 dB and a reinforced concrete slab 15 to 25 dB, which is why the room above your router can be weaker than a room at the far end of the same floor. Range Up applies one floor-loss figure to the whole plan, defaulting to 14 dB and adjustable from 8 to 30 dB, with the Material preset setting 13 dB for wood frame, 17 dB for brick and 22 dB for concrete.
Should the extender go on the same floor as the dead room?
Not necessarily. The placement search evaluates candidates on every floor and ranks them by how much they lift the room you nominated, so a position downstairs with a strong link to the router will sometimes beat a position in the problem room with nothing worth repeating. Judge the recommendation by the signal change in the target room, not by which floor it landed on.
Why does the whole floor above my router look weak?
Because floor loss applies to the entire floor, not just the part directly overhead. If everything upstairs is one band down from the equivalent spot downstairs, that is normal and expected. If it is three bands down, your floor loss setting is probably heavier than your actual construction, so check that the preset matches what the house is really built from.
Can I delete a floor after I have drawn it?
Yes, but with a consequence: removing a floor also removes anything placed on it, and every floor above shifts down by one number. That renumbering is why it is worth setting the real floor count when you create the plan rather than adding and removing floors as you go.