I have not had range issues in my mid-sized house with the AP7 and gold to date (2 months in), but I am adding two ceiling mounts to make sure I don't (as I read that others have had issues too) in the barn and office. I love all the details the AP7 gives me, so much better than the erro 7 system it replaced. I upgraded to a decent switch that helped the 10gb WAN as I'm running a cable modem with a failover to Starlink.
In my research it seems the POE 7 and Pro 7 have about the same performance and specs, with the POE 7 being able to power with POE they can be mixed and matched. If I was in your situation I would use the POE 7’s in the locations that are mounted and needing to be powered with POE and in any location that would work for not needing mounted using a Max 7 for the benefit of the extra output and extra antennas.
The best case is to get the Max 7s and then run Ethernet between them where you can, but that is optional and you can use mesh.
The only thing the PoE stuff adds is a different way to power it and form factor. Technically you could run only power over PoE and it would just mesh, but that would be a waste of ethernet.
The only PoE ones I use are the outdoor ones because I don’t have an issue placing eeros around and I like the flexibility of not requiring PoE.
Another use case is you can have an eero that connects to the network over mesh, but you can Ethernet devices to them and the devices will use the eero as a wifi bridge. This means any device connected to a Eero 7 Max via Ethernet and using the mesh does get the full benefit of the extra radios. I like this option because the less devices you have connected to WiFi the more free the airwaves are for devices that must use WiFi.
If you’re going to buy eero, get either Pro 7 or Max 7 access points. That size house might take 3 of them. As people are saying, hardwired backhaul is better than wireless, but the wireless with eero is pretty darn good.
NHtrails
