WiFi strength when mounting inside panel

[stephenpapierski]

Are most people mounting the whole setup inside their electrical panels or routing everything to an external enclosure? For those mounting inside the panel, I'm curious if WiFi strength is an issue? I would think there would be problems mounting it inside an enclosed metal box. Something like the Sense Energy Monitor uses an antenna external to the panel.

It would be an option to mount an external antenna on the panel and use a nodemcu with an esp32-wroom-32u that has the u.fl connector instead of the onboard antenna. But if it's a non issue, then I'll just stick with the built-in antenna.

[stephenpapierski]

I can answer my own question now, but figured I would provide my results for anyone who's curious. I'm using a nodemcu-32s. Putting it inside the panel definitely negatively affected the signal strength, but it didn't seem to have a problem pushing the data through. I started around -77dBm outside the panel, and dropped to -94dBm at the lowest while inside the panel. I'm back to the mid 70s now though, so I'm guessing it finally swapped to a closer access point.