If your Wi-Fi turns weak the moment you walk into the bedroom or the kitchen, you have probably already tried the usual fixes, restarting the router, moving closer to it, or yelling at your internet provider. But there is a much cheaper household trick that keeps resurfacing online: using kitchen aluminum foil to reshape your router's signal.
It sounds like something out of a "jugaad", but this one actually has real science behind it. Back in 2017, computer scientists at Dartmouth College in the US tested the idea formally. Their research, built around a project called WiPrint, found that a properly shaped foil reflector placed near a router's antenna could noticeably redirect Wi-Fi signals, strengthening them in one direction while cutting down leakage in another. In their tests, a correctly shaped reflector pushed signal strength up by roughly 50 percent in the target direction, while reducing unwanted signal spillover elsewhere by close to 75 percent.
