3 ms·

Back in my last apartment we did powerline ethernet and it worked ok so long as the pcs weren't on the same electrical circuit as the ethernet adapters. I think

Back in my last apartment we did powerline ethernet and it worked ok so long as the pcs weren't on the same electrical circuit as the ethernet adapters. I think the huge power draw from the gaming pcs was causing interference with the adapter

viraptor 6y ago
Ah, interference is an issue too. I was actually thinking of wiring that makes half of the house completely separate. (Seen it in practice, not sure how that works on the wiring level)
- wtallis 6y ago
  That split comes from US residential electricity being 240V split-phase AC. Adjacent circuit breakers are on different phases that each provide 120V, and double-wide circuit breakers allow appliances like dryers and ovens to use the full 240V difference between phases. If your house (like mine) puts all the lighting circuits on one phase and all the 120V outlets on the other phase, then you'll probably have relatively little trouble with powerline networking going beyond a single circuit breaker. But if you're trying to get powerline networking to work between outlets on different phases, you'll have more trouble (but I've seen it suggested that it might work better while the dryer is running and providing more coupling between phases). Side note: the transformer on our street once had one of its phases fail. All the outlets in our house dropped to some useless voltage like ~30V AC, but the lights worked fine. Next door, the lights went out but the outlets worked fine. The light in the clothes dryer came on at half brightness. This was very puzzling, not the least because we were all used to issues with that transformer knocking out power entirely when it was hit by another teenage driver. Most of us didn't understand until then how a transformer could fail half-way.
  - ralph84 6y ago
    After a windstorm my outlets weren't working but the lights were. Took me a while to figure out what was going on, but one of the hot wires had come loose at the weatherhead. The other hot and neutral were still connected. PG&E came out to fix it within an hour.

viraptor 6y ago

Ah, interference is an issue too. I was actually thinking of wiring that makes half of the house completely separate. (Seen it in practice, not sure how that works on the wiring level)

wtallis 6y ago
That split comes from US residential electricity being 240V split-phase AC. Adjacent circuit breakers are on different phases that each provide 120V, and double-wide circuit breakers allow appliances like dryers and ovens to use the full 240V difference between phases. If your house (like mine) puts all the lighting circuits on one phase and all the 120V outlets on the other phase, then you'll probably have relatively little trouble with powerline networking going beyond a single circuit breaker. But if you're trying to get powerline networking to work between outlets on different phases, you'll have more trouble (but I've seen it suggested that it might work better while the dryer is running and providing more coupling between phases). Side note: the transformer on our street once had one of its phases fail. All the outlets in our house dropped to some useless voltage like ~30V AC, but the lights worked fine. Next door, the lights went out but the outlets worked fine. The light in the clothes dryer came on at half brightness. This was very puzzling, not the least because we were all used to issues with that transformer knocking out power entirely when it was hit by another teenage driver. Most of us didn't understand until then how a transformer could fail half-way.
- ralph84 6y ago
  After a windstorm my outlets weren't working but the lights were. Took me a while to figure out what was going on, but one of the hot wires had come loose at the weatherhead. The other hot and neutral were still connected. PG&E came out to fix it within an hour.