Yet Another Cycling Forum
General Category => The Knowledge => Ctrl-Alt-Del => Topic started by: Wombat on 06 March, 2020, 06:42:54 pm
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I have given up on my attempt to get CAT6 cable across to my workshop through the disused heating oil supply pipe. I can get 10 metres of the required 11 through it, so I excavated back 1.5 metres and tried again, and I can only get 9 metres down it now... Enough!
So, I need to get internet to said workshop, as the wifi on my pathetic BT super wonder Ultrafast smart hub is shit, and barely makes it 3/4 of the way across the house, let alone across the yard and into the olde-worlde Faraday cage (i.e. corrugated iron barn) that houses my workshop. Powerline adaptors, folk have said, and they do allegedly work on different ring mains. So, the question that I can't find the answer to in manufacturers blurb is: Can I feed its signal via a network switch? The crap BT router/hub thingy only has 3 ports, rather than the claimed 4 (well there's 4 sockets, but one of them is the input, so it doesn't count) and they are currently occupied by 1. the feed to the PC, 2. the feed to the living room stuff (TV and other media equipment), and 3. the NAS, which sits right alongside the hub. I've got a spare way on the switch in the living room, but not a spare socket to power it (apparently they don't like adaptors/power strips/whatever) the office has enough power sockets, but no available data port, so suggestions as to how I get power and data to a powerline adaptor are welcome. I don't want to buy a network switch only to find it won't work!
All this, just to listen to the bloody radio in my workshop! There is bugger all FM or DAB signal in our area anyway, and expecting to get a signal inside a workshop that is lined with foil faced insulation, inside a corrugated iron clad barn, is living in fairyland.
If small radios had aerial sockets, I'd install an aerial on the barn, like the monstrous thing I've installed on the house, but they don't and anyway I'm reluctant to make the barn look like a dwelling, I prefer to maintain the pretence its just a barn. I've got a wifi extender thingy, which "sort of" works, in parts of the workshop, when it feels like it, but I just want a reliable signal for radio and internet.
Ideas? Yes, I know its my fault for living in the sticks...
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I have given up on my attempt to get CAT6 cable across to my workshop through the disused heating oil supply pipe. I can get 10 metres of the required 11 through it, so I excavated back 1.5 metres and tried again, and I can only get 9 metres down it now... Enough!
Are you pushing?
Try sucking a thread down the pipe with a vacuum cleaner, then use that as a drawstring.
Yeah, no problem going via a switch.
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Electricians fish tape?
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I have given up on my attempt to get CAT6 cable across to my workshop through the disused heating oil supply pipe. I can get 10 metres of the required 11 through it, so I excavated back 1.5 metres and tried again, and I can only get 9 metres down it now... Enough!
Are you pushing?
Try sucking a thread down the pipe with a vacuum cleaner, then use that as a drawstring.
Yeah, no problem going via a switch.
I've tried both blowing and sucking (!) but the problem with sucking a fine thread down there is that it had water in it, and I made the marginal decision to displace and lubricate it with WD40, which means it'll never be dry again (but then it will have had dried residue from heating oil, and rainwater and atmospheric dirt in it).
Blowing was done with 100psi from my compressor, sucking by monster workshop vac.
I think therefore, I'll buy the things, try in living room on existing switch, and if it doesn't like the power extension lead thing, buy another network switch and put it in the office.
Thanks!
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Electricians fish tape?
Bin there, done that, both with unassisted pushing, and with airflow assistance from my compressor.
No dice. Obviously it's in a shallow arc, from ground level at each end, to about 300 below ground in between. Annoyingly it's not a specific obstruction, it goes in about the same distance from either end. I thought I was being clever using an existing resource, but no....
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I've tried both blowing and sucking (!) but the problem with sucking a fine thread down there is that it had water in it, and I made the marginal decision to displace and lubricate it with WD40, which means it'll never be dry again (but then it will have had dried residue from heating oil, and rainwater and atmospheric dirt in it).
Blowing was done with 100psi from my compressor, sucking by monster workshop vac.
Yeah, I'd say that sounds like 'Enough!'
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Set of electricians duct rods or for budget version 2.5mm galvanised garden wire
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You'll be fine, I have a devolo plugged into a 6 way power strip under my desk and connected into a switch. The other devolo is in Mrs Tween's barn fully 80 meters away. I've never tested the bandwidth but it's had extensive use for listening to intertubes radio.
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Can depend on the wiring. My experience (admittedly from about 15 years ago :o ) is that it is not good on different circuits connected only at the distribution board.
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This is another option if the powerline turns out not to work...
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wireless-Waterproof-Installation-Controller-EAP110-Outdoor/dp/B01N4EGN6H
(or similar)
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Along similar lines - something like a Ubiquti Nano stuff will give good results and not huge money (bit more than a powerline adapter, but particularly if you are jumping across dis boards, this will give higher performance overall). I've seen Ubiquiti used on a number of projects I've worked on (usually some of the more hardcore point-to-point boxes, but sometimes the Nanobeams)
https://www.broadbandbuyer.com/products/30942-ubiquiti-ns-5acl-kit/
It's my back-up plan for the new garden office building; but as the sparks has to run armoured electrical cables up there, I am positive we can get some Cat6 up there as well.
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I run Powerline adaptors between the office in the house, and a shed some 30m away connected via its own armoured spur. Perfectly ok for streaming. This over (soon to be replaced) 40 year old wiring. As an aside, my Sonos bridge with line of sight also works fine over that distance (gotta have tunes when fettling ;D)
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If you can get line-of-sight, then using a wireless access point and a wireless client will work over long distances with directional aerials. With omni-directional aerials you will get 50 m with no problem
About 15 years ago, we had internet delivered with directional aerials to the old house over a distance of 1.5 miles. The wireless client aerial can be seen on the chimney here:- https://www.zoopla.co.uk/property/holly-cottage/barton-road/carlton/nuneaton/cv13-0db/5771051#image-1 (https://www.zoopla.co.uk/property/holly-cottage/barton-road/carlton/nuneaton/cv13-0db/5771051#image-1)
This was how far it had to go:-
(https://www.mtrak.co.uk/pictures/personal/wifi.png)
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My experience of power line networking is 30 years old. I'm curious, does vacuuming (or other motor use) affect them still?
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Eek! Hope not, as said workshop contains a milling machine, lathe, various electric fettling machinery, etc. I shall report on my experiences, powerline adaptors ordered. It's only 15m or so from my living room, which is itself 10m+ from the router in my office. I was surprised at the feebleness of the BT wifi, considering their adverts where it is touted as the most powerful available, but its nowhere near as powerful as the wifi on my old Virgin/Netgear router, which comfortably managed to get up the 30m long back garden to my brick workshop, from the front of the house. I was interested to note the stuff about directional aerials. Hmm, that might've worked, its direct line of sight from the lounge window (and adjacent handy barge board/roof of the bungalow) to the window in the tin edifice of my barn.
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I run Powerline adaptors between the office in the house, and a shed some 30m away connected via its own armoured spur. Perfectly ok for streaming. This over (soon to be replaced) 40 year old wiring. As an aside, my Sonos bridge with line of sight also works fine over that distance (gotta have tunes when fettling ;D)
If your Sonos bridge works why don’t you just use the cat5 socket in the back of that to get interweb ?
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Powerline just works here on different rings and The Asbestos Palace's interestingly shonky wiring. The kindly donation of a better wifi device upstairs makes up for the very feeble BT wifi (that barely escapes the nest under the stairs – admittedly not the best location, but that's where the phone line is, and yeah, yeah, we should have had it relocated when we had the place refurbished). Anyway, a pair of powerline adaptors connect those. Last time I bothered checking they were running around 150Mb/s. They're older models (probably 8ish years old).
As a bonus, they're simple and faff-free, plug them in, press the buttons. Never noticed any disruption when other electronics are doing their stuff. The Arlo security thing is also connected via a powerline adaptor since it has to sit somewhere where it has line-of-sight (via the patio doors) to the camera by the garage at the bottom of the garden. One day I ought to move the Sonos Boost from the understair nest though for reasons it doesn't recommend powerline adaptors, however, I generally ignore instructions (it mostly works, other than for all five speakers dotted around the house, I can have downstairs or upstairs, I blame the Hell portal under the hallway floor).
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Powerline adaptors are just The Devil's Radio ineffectively[1] confined to the mains wiring. As with anything else RF, whether or not it actually works is a suck-it-and-see proposition.
[1] Ask a radio ham.
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Ours work fine 99& of the time. The one nearest my laptop will start dropping connectivity to the base adaptor for about 2 minutes then start working again and be fine for several hours and do it again. Probably something banging noise onto that ring main. Haven't worked out what it is as by the time I decide to do something about it it fixes itself. Sometimes its fine for days. Seems to happen in spurts.
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I was surprised at the feebleness of the BT wifi, considering their adverts where it is touted as the most powerful available, but its nowhere near as powerful as the wifi on my old Virgin/Netgear router, which comfortably managed to get up the 30m long back garden to my brick workshop, from the front of the house.
It's probably possible to switch the Wi-Fi off on your BT thing and just use it as a modem, and then (if you've still got it) use the Virgin thingy as your Wi-Fi. You do have to make sure only one of them is doing DHCP and NAS if using the LAN sockets.
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I've used powerline adapters for ages, on my 3rd set
They all seem to last 3 or 4 years then something goes pop
The current batch are easy to pair
Also have previously used a directional wifi antenna. Standard modern wifi dsl routers don't have plugs for adding a massive radiator.
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[1] Ask a radio ham.
I did consider that and so checked for conspicuously large antennae around & found none1. Plus the house walls are 2' thick solid stone, most of the distance is in armoured cable and the barn walls are 18" solid stone. Still, when upgrading my main switch I bought one that takes SFPs, if a neighbour asked I'd run a fibre instead as the power cable is maxed out when the kiln is running. Two motivations would tip the hassle balance.
1I missed one, just outside my search range, it's the size of a transit van roof rack, for FM and aligned almost perfectly perpendicular.
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I've used powerline adapters for ages, on my 3rd set
They all seem to last 3 or 4 years then something goes pop
Exact same experience here, 3 or 4 years go by and one suddenly decides to stop working, usually with some browning around the pass-through socket, and finding a single one that is compatible with the existing one is nigh on impossible so they get junked and replaced as pairs.
If I ever get the house rewired I'll get proper network cabling in but with a recent rejig of things I don't really need the powerline adapters any more. The three things that need 1Gbps connections between themselves (laptop, ESXi server, NAS box) are now all right near each other and plugged into a single switch. Everything else only needs BB downloads speeds (currently ~60Mbps) and the wifi (with a separate BT disc to extend coverage a bit) can handle that with no problems.
Semi-regular hoovering (including upstairs and downstairs flats) and I don't notice any problems with the powerline adapters and neither of the other flats have complained about random interference from the powerline adapters (we are obviously on different mains spurs).
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My original TP-Link powerline adaptors have been running 24/7 for about 8 years (they're only restarted by house moves and powercuts). There's a newer one for the Arlo, despite being different models, they all play well together at whatever the speed limitation of the slowest part of the network, and can be bought as singles.
The only demanding network thing here is writing backups to the NAS, which is a bit slow, but runs in the background anyway. Everything else is limited by the 60ish Mb/s FTTC internet.
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What Ian said, plus I've had a good connection in our garage which is 20m from the house on a separate spur off the consumer unit, with its own RCD and breakers.
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Same as Ian, running nonstop for 7 years supplying old sky box. Almost forgot I had them.
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I'm the person who flooded the house with cat6 when we had building works going on.
It terminates in a cabinet with Dell PowerConnect PoE Gigabit switches.
There are private, public and management VLANS.
And yet, when we had a temporary rental property in Edinburgh for a year, I used modern simple powerline kit, with a simple flat network architecture.
This was to get Internet to the Living Room, from the hallway where the ADSL router was, beside the only phone point.
In the living room, a small cheap 8-port gigabit switch fed the TV and streaming boxes from the powerline feed.
I was very happy with it. It did indeed Just Work.
I've come to the conclusion that for most domestic-use scenarios, I think it's a good way to extend the LAN beyond WiFi range without running cat 5/6.
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I've come to the conclusion that for most domestic-use scenarios, I think it's a good way to extend the LAN beyond WiFi range without running cat 5/6.
While I'm strongly of the just-run-a-cable disposition, I've seen it work well enough times that it certainly counts as Worth A Try if running proper cable is going to be a pain. Especially if you're not fussed about a bit of packet loss. It's just that sometimes it doesn't want to play, and it seems to double as a good way to detect faulty power supplies (mind you, so does ADSL).
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Powerline adaptors are a lot cheaper than having a place wired. We got quoted for adding meowy cable when we had The Asbestos Palace rewired and I forget how much, but it was significant (and we were at the stage of refurbishment were every day felt like we got up, filled a wheelbarrow with cash and then went to tip it into a hole while laughing manically before setting it on fire).
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Well, it works.
Successfully set up connected to the network switch in the living room, after the initial pairing done in the office, 'cos I can connect it to a bit of Cat 6 easily there, and there's loads of sockets, the cloning of the router connection guff, and now it just seems to work, with the phone and scabby tablet thinking its connected to the router itself. This works not only in the workshop, but also in the whole of the corrugated iron barn outside. i haven't yet checked if it still works outside the barn, i.e. through the corrugated iron sheet walls. If so, lets hope our supposedly wifi allergic neighbours haven't got a detector in their home, as it might make it to their back yard. Said neighbours have recently been connected to the BT fibre network (like wot we are) and think they are using no wifi cos its turned off on the router, but you can't turn BT wifi off! It turns off wifi for the user, but still broadcasts its bloody BT wifi fon bollocks, which I gather is supposed to be collectively forming a net for passing pedestrians with phones. Er, we live in the middle of nowhere, we do not get passing pedestrians, unless you count the occasional escaped sheep. If anyone knows a dodge for turning the wifi fon bollocks off, please let me know, as I resent providing a pointless service for the robbers at BT.
All that, just to get some radio in the workshop. The scabby tablet isn't ideal, but it'll do for now, using some radio app on it. its a Samsung thing, about 8 years old, running Android 4.something.
Thanks for guidance, all.
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You can turn all the BT wifis off via your account (of course, if you don't contribute you lose access in return).
Allergic to wifi. Ha. I'm allergic to Jazz FM.
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This is spooky, haven't been on here for a long time and came back specifically to ask a powerline adapter question and here's a thread about them. I've been using TPLink AV2000s now for 3 years faultlessly but a recent change of laptop seems to have instigated some troubles.
Through a lot a trial and error, resetting of the ethernet adaptor etc etc etc I've narrowed down my woes to the insertion of the battery charger lead into the laptop as the cause of the loss of network. As soon as I pull the plug out the system is all good again.
Does anyone have an idea as to why this is happening?
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This is spooky, haven't been on here for a long time and came back specifically to ask a powerline adapter question and here's a thread about them. I've been using TPLink AV2000s now for 3 years faultlessly but a recent change of laptop seems to have instigated some troubles.
Through a lot a trial and error, resetting of the ethernet adaptor etc etc etc I've narrowed down my woes to the insertion of the battery charger lead into the laptop as the cause of the loss of network. As soon as I pull the plug out the system is all good again.
Does anyone have an idea as to why this is happening?
Crap charger putting noise on the mains. I have the same with a cheap spare charger I bought on Amazon. Try using an extension lead or plug in socket that's designed to protect computer equipment with the charger. That fixed it for me.
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My guess would be dodgy (or poorly designed) power supply putting noise onto the mains wiring and obliterating the
other noise signal. (It may not be symptomatic unless under load, hence it happening when you plug the laptop in.) This is a classic way for them to fail, usually due to the main reservoir capacitor drying out. The laptop itself is likely to be much more tolerant of poorly-regulated power than the powerline adaptors (or indeed, nearby DSL modems) are likely to be tolerant of interference, hence it appears to still work.
If you place a de-tuned AM radio nearby and find it makes squealing noises when you plug the power supply in, that would be indicative. (As would more specific diagnostics involving things like oscilloscopes, dremels and ESR meters.)
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Ah I see, both of these replies make sense, the laptop is an old one which my workplace let me buy cheaply and has been refurbished. The charging adapter is probably very old.
Thank you.
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Try putting something like this between the laptop PSU and the mains. As I said you can get a 4 way block version as well. Do not plug the Powerline Adaptor into the same 4 way block if you get one of those. Basically you want to protect your mains from the electrical noise from the PSU. Its sort of using these surge protectors backwards to their intended use which is to provide a non noisy mains supply to whats plugged into them.
Belkin Surge Protector (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Belkin-BSV102af-SurgeCube-Surge-Protection/dp/B00OLTJSZY/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=computer+protection+plug&qid=1584514874&sr=8-3)
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Try putting something like this between the laptop PSU and the mains. As I said you can get a 4 way block version as well. Do not plug the Powerline Adaptor into the same 4 way block if you get one of those. Basically you want to protect your mains from the electrical noise from the PSU. Its sort of using these surge protectors backwards to their intended use which is to provide a non noisy mains supply to whats plugged into them.
Belkin Surge Protector (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Belkin-BSV102af-SurgeCube-Surge-Protection/dp/B00OLTJSZY/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=computer+protection+plug&qid=1584514874&sr=8-3)
Thank you. This may prove tricky as the route to the end plug is as follows spur out from kitchen underground into the garage, spur off from where the socket used to be and down to where I relocated it at the end of the garage and then into a 'powerbank' thing which has about 7 or 8 sockets on it. The laptop and powerline adapter are both plugged into that.
Thanks for the assistance. TBH, all I have to do is ensure the laptop is charged for when I'm using it and just stick to battery power.
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Thank you. This may prove tricky as the route to the end plug is as follows spur out from kitchen underground into the garage, spur off from where the socket used to be and down to where I relocated it at the end of the garage and then into a 'powerbank' thing which has about 7 or 8 sockets on it. The laptop and powerline adapter are both plugged into that.
Just put the smoother on your power supply mains lead wherever its plugged in. That should do it.
What I meant wsa you shouldnt go
Laptop PSU -> Extension multi-socket block
Powerline -> same multi-socket block
Same ulti-scocket block -> smoother -> mains
It should be
Laptop PSU -> smoother -> same multi-socket block -> mains (or wall socket if its plugged straight into the wall).