Our Router Died

The other day, completely out of the blue, our old Unifi Dream Machine took a shit. It was fine in the morning. I went out to the garage and did my workout, and when I went to log it, my tablet and then my computer both kept saying no internet. At first, I hadn’t noticed that the dream machine wasn’t lit up. The fan was running full speed, so maybe I heard that and assumed it was running.

That old Unifi machine had served us well. It should have lasted longer since it was pricey. We got 4 or 5 years out of it, which is a rarity these days. We did have power issues with our circuit breaker box in the basement. That was after we bought this Unfi Dream machine and had it set up. That could have shortened its life. We also had some close lightning strikes and a surge last summer when the transformer in front of the house burned out.

The old Mikrotik was good too, and much cheaper. The wifi and that device weren’t as strong in our house. Molly kept losing signal outside on the patio. Meshing with that was pretty flaky. Using the UniFi with another meshed UniFi access point in the garage, she never had issues with her wifi.

We have to mesh with Wifi. Tell me why we did not just put ethernet in the ceiling and wall down in the kitchen below me when we had them open. I even thought of it back then but we didn’t do it.

The lucky thing for us is that I do store some old eletronics and we had that old Mikrotik Hap AC in the attic. We almost recycled it but I remember thinking it takes up virtually no space compared to other stuff so we should hold on to it as a backup. That thought proccess came in handy when the Dream Machine died out of the blue.