I mounted mine to the outdoor TV antenna mast, added an open SSID and set it to 100%. If I’m covering the entire sports oval next to me I might as well share it.

(And yes, I know how to isolate the subnet)

I let the APs auto manage their tx power. Aerohive firmware does a decent job of not running wide open when it doesn’t need to. I also have 1 AP per floor to get adequate coverage.

My cable modem doesn’t have Wi-Fi. I turned it off on my router since it’s in the basement and there’s a dedicated AP down there.

Yes, but only for 2.4 ghz since I live in a small apartment and there’s no benefit to high transmit power in those cases. 5 ghz is another story since it doesn’t penetrate walls easily anyway, so no harm to others.

The router doesn’t reach everywhere on the default setting.

I have two Wireless Access Points (WAP) and a separate router/ firewall. The WAPs are meshed, meaning as a WiFi connected device moves through my house, it will be automatically handed off to the WAP with the best quality.

Power and channel of the two WAPs use are automatic. I live in a fairly dense neighborhood. Meaning my neighbors are so dense they barely have done any configuration of their WiFi. There are also a lot of them. The main thing I worry about is having just enough transmit power to give a good quality connection within the house, without being so strong it interferes with my neighbors’ networks.

I would never leave the management of my home network to an ISP. With that said, I’ve been an IT professional for 30 years and got my start in networking.

My upstairs WAP often works at higher power, but I don’t remember seeing it at 100%. It is fighting all the other WiFi routers that are nearby. There are so many that there are no clear channels on 2.4GHz and very few at 5GHz. The WAP in the basement is better shielded, so I almost never see it at high transmit powers.

My router is a separate unit that provides routing, firewall, IPS/IDS, DNS, and management for itself and the WAPs.

No, you almost never require 100% transmit power out of a WAP. The best thing is to have a good quality WiFi router or WAP and set it to “automatic” for channel and power settings. That way the unit can determine what is best for network quality on the fly. It will be better at it than you logging in multiple times a day doing the same thing manually.

When I lived in and apartment, I used a WRT wifi router as my bridge, for the sole purpose to boost the signal strength to the maximum, just to power through the interference from other apartments. My house came prewired with Cat-6 cables, so now I have small wifi hubs at minimum strength on each floor for my phone and home automation.

The bare minimum required by me is past the default my ISP-provided router allowed and I ened up having to do a bunch of extra stuff to get full coverage.

So no.

I’m an electrical engineer and into ham radio. WiFi is the last of my concerns, health-wise.

To even begin to worry about that I should first start eating healthier, work out more than once a week, and so something about all the microplastic in my brain, I guess. I’m not a medical processional, but it’s pretty far down the list. And regarding power consumption… This thing uses like 10 W, of which probably <1 is influenced by the radio power.

Back before Mesh and Roaming between APs was a thing I used to adjust the transmit power on my three DDWRT APs so that they didnt overlap fully to force roaming between them. I did this mostly because I didnt want too many devices on the same AP as a lot of devices back then would be stubbonly sticky to the first AP they found and APs could handle a lot less loading that they do now so it was far more important to spread devices out across the APs.

Now I still have three APs but they all WiFi 6 as are the main devices that use it so I do not bother micro managing it as WiFi 6 is much better at congestion and Roaming. I would rather have more range than worry about it, I have good coverage from the back of my garden to the front of my drive, its not essential that I have that but it is very very useful at times.

5Ghz penetrates a lot less than 2.4Ghz so that does not cause as much problems if left at 100%. 2.4Ghz can be a pain for others but I cannot wait to turn that off at some point in the future anyway.

I know that i can reduce the upper limit, but then I would need more access points to cover everything.

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I did reduce the WiFi transmit power of my AP because it used to overheat with 100%

I reduced max power, but keep my AP’s set to auto manage up to that max level.

There’s basically a plane of signal that bisects the house where the RSSI of each AP is the same. It intersects with areas where people commonly are on their phones. Depending on humidity, location of people and pets, or even just dumb luck, devices were just bouncing between the AP’s, fishing for whichever had the stronger signal. Dropping the power levels made it so the overlap between the AP’s was less, and adjusting the RSSI at which the AP would hand off clients upward made it so handoffs were less frequent. Small throughput sacrifice in the transition zone, but without the constant bouncing between AP’s (which has no throughput).

I use my cell data in my bedroom because it’s more stable than my router connection. I wish I had control of the router, but it’s not my house. I’d just move the router to a more centralized location instead of the farthest corner.

Back before I moved, I kept the router at one of the reduced power modes it had built in(can’t remember the exact settings) since the room it sat in was the best room for signal distribution, you still got full signal anywhere you went.

i think on mine it is labeled as ‘max transmit power’. i dunno how often it will try to max transmit, but I set it enough to cover the usual places i chill around.

sometimes i do require 100%, for science. but on day-to-day, nah.