So I have 46 IOT devices connected at home and at around 32 items I found I was unable to connect more of them.
After some serious troubleshooting I discovered that the router has a limitation on the “Clients Name” field. The client names for some of my items were exceedingly long such as:
Sonos_1xw8dbh5PsnK8geSPSBenY7VqI.37fnnxIzvkGz-o9Vwuop
My LifX globes also had long names in the router and by chance I discovered that the router had reached its limit for that one field and would not allow any new connections.
I shortened all of my device names to just a few characters such as Sonos, Lifx, Wyze, Wemo etc because it made no difference to the device apps at all and now I can connect new devices without issue.
I reported this to ASUS as well…but I thought in case you have issues its another path to troubleshoot down.
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If ASUS doesn’t bother fixing this, consider using merlin firmware on your router. It’s basically ASUS firmware that someone else looked over and fixed up.
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I’ve had two ASUS routers and I loaded the Merlin firmware on both. Custom firmwares get a bad rep for instability and complexity (looking at you DD-WRT), but as you said the Merlin firmware is basically stock firmware with a bunch of fixes and nice features added. Many times I’ve heard about issues with ASUS routers and thought “weird, I’ve never had that issue”, then I see that it was fixed in Merlin’s firmware 
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Many routers have a device limitation of 32 devices per network. In other words, 32 on the 2.4Ghz, and then an additional 32 on the 5Ghz.
Not knowing your router model, I would recommend checking with the Asus support site and/or forums. I had a similar limitation with my old Netgear R7000. Good luck! 
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Yeah I found out that free routers from an ISP can max out at 15-25 WiFi devices (mines 20), but on top of that the DHCP server is limited to 30 on the one I have so even hardwiring as much as possible I had issues
Netgear gaming routers can handle 70 devices, most providers don’t specify, I looked at a Cisco and that was only rated for 35 devices
I ended up getting a commercial router, rated for 120 WiFi devices (2.5ghz, 5ghz or a combination) 200 Lan devices, 250 DHCP clients
Wonder if the amount of connections effect what drops out & what’s stable
