How to Identify Your Wall Material and Set It in Range Up
Knock, pin, magnet, drill. How to identify your wall material, what it costs your Wi-Fi signal in dB, and how far the wrong setting moves the answer you get.
You can draw a perfect floor plan and still get the wrong answer out of it. Wall material is the one input capable of doing that. Get a room's depth wrong by two feet and the recommendation barely twitches; get a wall type wrong by one category and the map shifts three color bands, in the direction that costs money.
Here is how to find out what your walls are actually made of, using things you already own, and what to do with the answer.
The wall setting is the biggest lever in the plan#
Range Up traces a straight line from the router to every square of your plan and charges the signal for what that line crosses. Open floor costs distance only. A door costs a fraction of what a wall does. A wall costs the wall-loss figure you set, every time the line crosses one.
Planner Settings holds one Material preset for the whole plan. The three choices fill in different wall and door loss defaults:
| Preset | Wall loss | Door loss | Fits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wood frame | 3 dB | 1 dB | Timber studs and gypsum board — most US homes since the 1960s |
| Brick | 10 dB | 2 dB | Solid brick or block interior walls, common in older European housing |
| Concrete | 12 dB | 3 dB | Poured walls, apartment blocks, converted commercial buildings |
The preset only fills the boxes. Wall loss and Door loss are sliders of their own under Signal Model, editable past whatever the preset set — real reinforced concrete costs more than 12 dB. Treat a preset as a starting point, not a verdict.
Five ways to tell what your walls are made of#
Cheapest first. The first four take about a minute between them; the fifth settles it.
- Knock with a knuckle, in three places. A stud wall drums — a hollow box sound with some give, going solid every 16 inches or so where a stud sits. Masonry gives you nothing: a flat, dead tap that does not change along the wall.
- Push a thumbtack in. Drywall takes a pin under thumb pressure alone. Lath and plaster resists, then crumbles a small rim around the point. Brick, block and concrete refuse.
- Drag a fridge magnet across it at chest height. Regular grabs every 16 or 24 inches are drywall screws in the studs — normal, and good news. A magnet that pulls continuously along the whole wall means metal lath behind the plaster, which is not a setting, it is a wall you route around. Why is in what each building material costs you.
- Measure the door reveal. A jamb depth of 4.5 to 5 inches is a stud partition. Six to eight inches usually means masonry plastered on both faces. Over nine inches is solid double-leaf masonry, or an old exterior wall an extension swallowed.
- Drill a 1/16 inch hole and read the dust. Pick somewhere invisible — low behind a bookcase, inside a closet — drill slowly, and watch what comes out.
| What comes out, and how it drills | Almost certainly | Typical loss at 5 GHz |
|---|---|---|
| White or gray powder, through in a second, void behind | Gypsum board on timber studs | 3-6 dB |
| White powder, then wood shavings | A stud. Move four inches and retry | — |
| Chalky gray dust with hair or fibers in it | Lath and plaster | 5-8 dB, unless the magnet said metal lath |
| Red or pink gritty dust | Clay brick | 10-16 dB |
| Gray gritty dust, then the bit drops into a void | Hollow concrete block | 10-16 dB |
| Gray dust, the bit barely bites and needs real force | Poured or reinforced concrete | 15-25 dB |
Setting what you found in the app#
Pick the preset that matches most of the house, then raise or lower the global Wall loss until it describes the walls on the path that matters, even if that is heavier than the rest of the house deserves.
| What you found | Preset to choose | Then adjust wall loss to | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hollow knock, pin goes in, white dust | Wood frame | 3-4 dB bare, 5-6 dB with wiring, pipes or insulation | The preset sits at the light end of the real range |
| Hollow knock, pin refuses, chalky dust | Wood frame | 6-8 dB | Plaster is denser than board, and usually thicker |
| Magnet pulls continuously along the wall | Whatever fits the rest | No number models it — route around this wall | Metal lath behaves more like a mirror |
| Dead knock, red or pink dust | Brick | 10-12 dB | The preset is already close |
| Dead knock, gray dust, void behind | Brick | 10-12 dB | Hollow block behaves much like single-leaf brick |
| Dead knock, drill fights you | Concrete | 15-18 dB | 12 dB is optimistic for a real reinforced wall |
A pessimistic map elsewhere costs nothing: it only moves the recommended position closer to the router.
Doors deserve thirty seconds too, and Door loss is global as well. A hollow-core interior door is worth a couple of dB, a solid wood or fire door costs 4 to 6 dB, and an opening you never close costs almost nothing. Keep the value low if your doors stay open, so a door tile models the doorway rather than the slab of wood. Push it toward 4 dB if the problem room sits behind a heavy door that is always shut.
When the house is built two ways#
Most homes are mixed: stud partitions inside, masonry outside, one dense wall around a chimney or a bathroom. Two rules keep that manageable.
Only the walls on the line that matters count. Draw the straight path from the router to the room that fails and classify what it crosses — that is what the global figure describes. Nothing else in the plan is deciding your answer — drawing a plan the simulation can use covers the sketching itself.
If the heavy wall is the first one, move the router instead. A masonry wall standing beside the router spends the budget before anything else gets a chance, and no setting recovers it. Moving the router to the open side of it is free, and it often removes the reason you opened the app. Solid old houses have the rest of that playbook in Wi-Fi in brick and concrete homes.
How much a wrong guess moves the answer#
Wall loss multiplies by the number of walls, so a small error per wall becomes a large error in the room.
| Walls on the path | At 3 dB each | At 10 dB each | At 16 dB each |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 wall | 3 dB | 10 dB | 16 dB |
| 2 walls | 6 dB | 20 dB | 32 dB |
| 3 walls | 9 dB | 30 dB | 48 dB |
| 4 walls | 12 dB | 40 dB | 64 dB |
Three walls is an ordinary path across an ordinary house, and the gap between the first two columns is 21 dB. Each usable color band on the map spans roughly 5 to 7 dB — see what the color bands mean — so that gap is three or four whole bands. A room the light setting paints comfortably green lands in red once the walls are brick.
Three things move with it:
- Where an extender is allowed to stand. A candidate is only worth using if it still hears the router at about -60 to -67 dBm. With 3 dB walls, most outlets clear that bar, including ones two rooms out. With 12 dB walls, only the router's own room and whatever sits on a clear doorway line from it qualifies.
- How many radios you need. Plan roughly one access point per 1,000 to 1,500 sq ft in open, timber-framed construction, and one per 700 to 1,000 sq ft in brick, block or plaster and lath. The same 2,000 sq ft plan is a one-node job or a three-node job on this setting alone.
- Whether doorways beat distance. Doubling your distance from the router in open air costs about 6 dB. At 3 dB, a wall costs less than that and routing barely matters. At 12 dB, one wall costs as much as doubling the distance twice, and the long way around through open doorways wins.
When the walls say an extender is the wrong tool#
Set the materials honestly and the map will sometimes tell you something you did not want to hear.
The best candidate lifts your target by less than about 10 dB. With heavy walls, the positions that still hear the router cleanly sit so close to it that they barely reach past it. The search always returns a best position; the question is the size of the win, which the before-and-after coverage check puts in plain dB. Under 10 dB, placement is not your constraint.
The magnet pulled continuously. Metal lath, foil-backed insulation and a mirrored closet door are not expensive walls, they are closed doors. Go around them through an opening, or under them with a cable.
Every path crosses two or more masonry walls. Two brick walls is 20 to 32 dB gone before the signal travels a foot. A wireless hop cannot pay that and still leave something worth repeating, and a single-radio repeater roughly halves the throughput of everything behind it. A wired backhaul carries no wireless penalty, and the far node behaves like a second router.
Doing it in Range Up#
Sketch the outline with the Wall and Door tools, then open Planner Settings before you look at a single color. Pick the Material preset matching what your knuckle, your magnet and your drill bit found, tune Wall loss until it describes the two or three walls between the router and the room that matters, and set Door loss to match how you actually live. Only then place the router and mark the target room. Everything downstream inherits those figures — the colors you read, the order the candidate outlets come back in, the size of the win — and all of it is arithmetic on your drawing, run on the phone, with nothing measured off your live network. How to act on the position it returns is covered in the extender placement rules; install Range Up and spend its first minute on the walls, not the furniture.
Frequently asked questions#
How do I know if my walls are drywall or plaster?
Push a thumbtack into an inconspicuous spot. Drywall takes a pin under thumb pressure alone, while lath and plaster resists and crumbles a small rim around the point. A knuckle knock backs it up: drywall drums hollow and goes solid every 16 inches at the studs, whereas plaster on lath sounds duller and more uniform along its length.
What wall material should I set in Range Up?
Start from the Material preset that matches your construction — Wood frame at 3 dB per wall, Brick at 10 dB, Concrete at 12 dB — then set the Wall loss slider for the walls between the router and the room that fails, because that one figure covers the whole plan. Push it to 5 or 6 dB for stud partitions carrying wiring or pipes, and to 15 to 18 dB for real reinforced concrete, because the presets are deliberately conservative. If you are torn, pick the heavier preset.
How much Wi-Fi signal does a brick wall block?
A single-leaf brick or cinder block wall typically costs 10 to 16 dB at 5 GHz, against 3 to 6 dB for an ordinary drywall stud partition. That is roughly the difference between a room that streams 4K comfortably and a room where video calls break up. At 2.4 GHz the same wall costs around half as much, which is why the slower band often reaches rooms the faster one cannot.
Does it matter if I get the wall material slightly wrong?
A decibel or two per wall is noise, but the error multiplies by the number of walls on the path. Three walls set at 3 dB when they are really 10 dB puts the map 21 dB off in the room you care about — three or four color bands — which is enough to recommend a position that will not work. Being wrong by one material category matters far more than being wrong about any room dimension.
My house has stud walls and brick walls. Which do I set?
You set one figure for the whole plan, so set it for the walls that decide the answer — the two or three on the straight line between the router and the problem room. If those are brick and the rest is stud, choose Brick and raise wall loss; the rest of the map goes pessimistic, which only pulls the recommended extender position closer to the router. That is the safe direction to be wrong in.
Do thicker walls mean I need more extenders?
Usually yes, and sooner than people expect. A rule of thumb is one access point per 1,000 to 1,500 sq ft in open timber-framed construction, and one per 700 to 1,000 sq ft in brick, block or concrete. Beyond two nodes, a wired backhaul is normally cheaper and better than another wireless hop, because every wireless hop costs throughput that the extra coverage cannot give back.