My Unify Dream Wall
The Unify Dream Wall was recently released and I’ve been using it as my home router since July 2022, so I thought I’d share my thoughts on it.
The screen is smaller on this version than the editions you can find in Ubiquiti's store, but other than that, it doesn't appear to be any other visible changes made.
Context
My family bought our first house in July 2022, a house built in 1930 with three floors and excessive ethernet wiring throughout the house by the previous owner. All cables connected at a single point in the basement where fiber also connected the house to the Internet.
The cable management before we moved in
Form factor
For our house, the form factor is much better than any alternative I’ve seen. The Power over Ethernet (PoE) ports also mean I have gotten rid of a bunch of PoE injectors around the house. The Micro SD card slot is good enough for our storage needs using Unify Protect with recording enabled during detected motion.
The Micro SD card holds the video recordings as part of Unify Protect, which is good enough for our home usage.
One thing I’m not sure about the idea behind, is the double power supplies (PSU). It has two, but since it only takes one power plug, I don’t really understand the purpose.
Thermals
I was surprised by the running temperature of the device when I turned it on without any load, quite hot. Thankfully it’s pretty much the same after connecting my devices, around 64°C. I’m only using around 33W out of maximum 420W PoE capacity though (3 access points and 2 cameras) and CPU utilisation is around 15-20%
Noise
The noise level was my biggest initial disappointment, coming from a traditional home router without a fan. The Dream Wall is a device with components equal to Ubiquiti’s rack mountable hardware and I think that’s how you should set your noise level expectations. Having that said, my wife uses the room as as music studio without complaining (after the initial reaction), but I wouldn’t want to sleep next to it.
Stability
There has been a few times with power outage in the house and the Dream Wall has had trouble starting up again. This is how it goes:
- Power comes back and the Dream Wall is on but not handling any traffic and the display says it needs to be restarted.
- I restart it and it says: “Est. Time Remaining: 5m”.
- After 5 minutes it says: “It is taking a little longer”. No matter how long I wait it doesn’t help (I’ve switched my computer to phone tethering and waited hours) ⛔
This is the procedure that has worked for me to get it running again.
- Power comes back and the Dream Wall is on but not handling any traffic and the display says it needs to be restarted.
- I shut it down and wait long enough for it to completely cool down (touching the aluminium on the left side where it gets the hottest)
- I start it again and it starts handling traffic. ✅
Other than that, it’s been great. Moving around the house and watching the phone seamlessly switch between WiFi access points is nice.
Final words
All in all, I’m happy with the purchase and would recommend it to anyone with a similar need.