Thanks for the follow-up. I'm sorry to say that I have never had the patience to deal with bureaucratic support organizations, especially when they just have you running around doing non-productive BS. As of right now, everything is running perfectly. I'm still running everything under AiMesh. But I've moved most devices off the Guest SSID. So I'm not going to bother reporting the problems at this time.
As I mentioned I've got about 70 clients total, about 60 smart devices relegated to my Guest subnet. Of those, 10 are outside Wi-Fi cameras which are always a challenge to keep running at an acceptable level of performance. My LAN covers a large area geographically. It is on the slope of a mountain so the terrain is hilly and wooded. About 1 acre of my 1.75 acre property has cameras and landscape lighting. I also have many smart bulbs, switches, and plugs inside and out. Of course, that last category doesn't consume much bandwidth.
My LAN consists of:
RT-AX88U Pro - (lastest Merlin RT-AX88U_PRO_3006_102.5_0) main router on the main floor in the back of the house. connected to ATT fiber ONT
*RT-AX3000 - (old Merlin RT-AX58U_3004_388.4_0) node on the other end of the house in a 2nd floor window.
*RT-AC68U (ASUS 3.0.0.4.386_51665) node in the man-cave basement to support media center and an office.
*RT-AC68U (ASUS 3.0.0.4.386_51665) node in the garage.
Most of my smart IoT devices were TP-Link Kasa or Tapo. The Kasa were all at least 4 yrs old. Camera's all less than I year old. All but 1 use 2.4 GHz
* nodes all have wired backhaul. The router and all nodes were on separate UPS so they never lost power during the 10 second gap (see below).
Note: I usually don't bother updating node's firmware unless there is a known issue. So the nodes were on firmware several years old.
I'm always finding new uses for adding IoT devices. Like you, I wondered when I might hit a ceiling threshold. But everything seemed to be running well until we had two days with 4-5 hour commercial power outages in the middle of the night (12AM - 5AM). I have an automatic backup generator that handles about 80% of my total commercial power load. There's about a 10 second delay before the backup kicks-in. Most important stuff had power except for that gap. My computers and net gear are on UPS so they were protected and no power gap. But lots of the IoT stuff were either briefly or totally without power during the outages. I spent the next day going around re-booting everything that stayed off-line. About 1/3 of the IoT devices, mostly cameras and outside lights/plugs/switches were problematic. Some devices would re-connect briefly, then go off-line. I even had trouble connecting to the Guest SSID with my phone. Even when fairly close to a node. I even had trouble re-connecting devices that were 50' and direct line-of-sight with a node. I think by the end of each day, I had more stuff down than when I started. Some of the problem cameras were solar powered and ran off battery, so I knew that the power outage (or possible power spikes) didn't affect them. But they still had trouble re-connecting.
Looking at the main router's AiMesh GUI, I could see that some of the nodes were carrying more of the work-load than usual. Surprisingly, the RT-AX3000 had the fewest client connections. It usually had 12+ clients connected. Many of the problem devices were on the side of the house that were served by the RT-AX3000 node. I had some spare equipment including a pre-configured RT-AC68U node, so I swapped it in place of the RT-AX3000. That seemed to help somewhat but didn't solve the problem. So It seemed that when I replaced a device with a newly configured one, it worked a little better but still had a weak signal. All the problem devices seemed to be on the Guest network, so the next day I started reconfiguring the problem devices to use the main SSID. And they were all working flawlessly with a strong signal.
Since the RT-AX3000 node seemed to be part of the problem, I have started testing it. I haven't concluded it was the main problem, but I feel it contributed to it. I'll continue testing. I reflashed it back to the latest ASUS firmware (RT-AX58U_3004_388.9_2). I did have some difficulty doing a manual factory reset, but it seems happy now.
So the bottom line is my entire LAN performance is better than ever. I can switch camera video sources much faster than I can remember. All devices stay connected. I'm happy. There's still a few (8) devices using the Guest SSID but I haven't noticed any problems on them. Some I don't even know what or where they are.
