Question

Homeplug fails on spur

Asked by: ccomley

I haev a house with meter-thick stone walls. WiFi is seriously attenuated. Homeplug to the rescue - what a fantastic tool!!! BUT.... in one recently re-wired section of the house, the HP unit just doesn't see the master unit upstairs. I've examined the wiring and can find no clear cause of the discontinuity. I know it's not range coz I have an HP unit in the stable at the bottom of the garden 400 feet away and THAT can see the master. The new spur is less than 30 feet of mains cable from the master. Clearly the new spur is working, lights, power, etc,. all operating.What else can tehre be? Earth is present - thugh the HP units don't attach to it. Liev and Neutra are clearly present or lights andpower wouldn't work. The "live" cable runs through a breaker - but so long as the breaker is "in" then taht should just appear as continuous copper (it's not an RCD or similar, just a ten-amp cutout). I haev tried unplugging all the other mains devices on teh new spur to see if one was interfering n some way. Nope. I've tried the new HP unit upstairs, where it works just fine.

Trouble is with technology that just "simply works" theres no knobs and buttons you can tinker with when for some reason, it simply doesn't.

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Asked On
2008-05-04 at 01:57:41ID23374668
Tags

Zyxel

,

PL-100

,

"Homeplug" 1.0 "Turbo"

Topic

Networking Hardware

Participating Experts
2
Points
500
Comments
7

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Answers

 

by: Press2EscPosted on 2008-05-04 at 04:28:47ID: 21495382

Is your homeplug is located in the newly wired section of the house?  I suspect your homeplug adapter may be having issues with "Cross-Phase coupling".  The homeplug signal may "crossing over" the different phases in the main power (circuit breaker) box.

In contrast to UK, US residences typically use a 3-phase (208/120 VAC) power scheme. I am not sure of your power scheme, but I believe your homes run off 230VAC circuits.

In the a multi-phased configuration, at the main (circuit breaker) electrical box there is a left and right side (aka "phases") of the breaker box. The right and left sides of the circuit breaker, sometime called L1 and L2, are electrically ISOLATED and "out of phase".

Perhaps your 2 HomePlug circuits are on different "phases".  If you plug the adapter in the same room as the other does the PC have access to the network?  If so, this exercise verifies the adapter is good & your problem may be (as stated above) is the electrical power for the 2 diff rooms are on diff (phases) circuits...

Make sense?  Clear as mud, eh?

P2E

 

by: Darr247Posted on 2008-05-04 at 08:49:44ID: 21496014

Most homes in the US do not use 3 phase power.

We typically use single phase 2 pole power, though. (2 poles derived from a single phase are far-less dangerous than 2 legs of 3 phase... at 60Hz, anyway. I think the UK uses 50Hz.)

The ethernet over power devices DO need to be on the same pole for them to talk to each other. So Press2Esc's answer was generally correct, just not technically.

How many wires are in this 'spur' that was added? If there are only 3 wires, you may not get any receptacles on that spur to pass the signal.

 

by: ccomleyPosted on 2008-05-05 at 11:25:58ID: 21501935

THis house is actually in france, where, like in the UK, we use SINGLE phase and we don't split the voltage either, so every 220v mains socket in the house is on the same phase. In UK we use ring-mains, which is ideal for HP I would haev thought. In france, mains wiring is "star". There's a wire running frmo the main consumer unit to each area of the house, where it's divided up with "secondary" breaker boxes.

At any given location tehre is only "live" and "neutral" (and Earth, of course). Any give Live wire is the same phase as any other (and taps the same point on the transformer - we dno't centre-tap for half-voltage like in the US.) This is not "two legs of three phase"< it's one leg of three-phase and Neutral. The house on each side of us will be on the other two phases, amiing for an over-all balance on any area of housing. (In commercial buildings, the building tends to be suppleid with three phase, which is then split up, e.g. Gnd floor Yellow = mains Red = lighting Blue = aircon etc,. 1st floor Red = mains, Blue = lighting, yellow = aircon... again, to aim for an over-all balance. WHich is one reason why HomePlug is so named, it isn't so useful in an office, :)



Mains frequecy is nominal 50Hz in both UK and France. Actually according to my UPS the frequency here is nearer 52Hz. Nothing else, including three other HP units, seems to care.


This is the *only* area of the house where the HP won't work. I'm uitterly baffled as to what can be different about it.

I've detected a suspect loose connection on the intermediate circuit breaker panel, I wonder if that's enough to upset it...

 

by: Darr247Posted on 2008-05-06 at 08:16:18ID: 21508027

Do you have a high-joule surge suppressor or RF filter connected on the new spur?

The tank circuits present in more-expensive line filters and suppressors could actually fiter out the HP signal.

 

by: Press2EscPosted on 2008-05-06 at 10:25:01ID: 21509215

Something is defintely different about this circuit..  Any kind of GFI, voltage supressors, lightening arrestors, UPS systems, etc on this leg??? Consider testing the AC recepticles with a recepticle tester that checks for open grounds, reverse polarity, open hot, open neutral, hot on neutral, hot & ground reverse, etc...

P2E

 

by: Darr247Posted on 2008-05-06 at 10:58:26ID: 21509473

Ground Fault Interrupters (GFI) would not interfere with the EoP carrier... unless the GFI opened the circuit, anyway... and that would kill everything 'downstream' of the GFI on the spur... still, the homeplug signal wouldn't cause it.

Arc Fault Interrupters _might_ be triggered by the EoP carrier, but that would also kill power to everything downstream of the AFI (and a loose connection in the subpanel would have a better chance of kicking out the AFI than the comparatively-small signal of the EoP).

 

by: ccomleyPosted on 2009-06-06 at 13:04:24ID: 24564183

No-one cracked  this. It still doesn't work. The only thing I can assume it is signal attenuation over a combination of distance and poor connections - I've had HP working over similar distances no sweat, but not HERE. More-over, the signal that GDF put om the mains to switch consumer meters over to "cheap rate" is continuos during the "cheap" period and clearly swamps the alreay weak HP signal over the longer distance.

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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