Stable Powerline Adapter - comparison/test available?

[rhagu]

Hi,
I have a cellar compartment with a wall outlet and ran a powerline adapter set ( FRITZ!Powerline 1220E Set | AVM International ) between this outlet and an outlet in my apartment. The connection was never great, but it just stopped working a few days ago. I do not really need high throughput as I would like to get some IoT device up and running in the cellar. Does someone of you know of a good comparison/test/review that takes a deeper look into stability/error handeling of different manufacturers?
Would appreciate any insight/ideas/recommendations.

kind regards,
rhagu

 

[dswartz]

No comparisons, sorry. I do use 2 of these:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0173CGWFY/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

to connect a webcam on the side of our garage to the main network. Once in a blue moon, it needs to be reset (unplugged/replugged), but overall pretty good.

 

[rhagu]

Hi dswartz,
thank you for your reply, I somehow hoped there would be a manufacturer with some kind of magic sauce I dont know about yet.
Maybe I should just do some testing.

 

[cesmith9999]

There is not. Powerline is pretty generic. If you have throughput issues, it is literally in your wiring.

I have cat 5 running on my baseboards because powerline was not good enough.

Chris

 

[WANg]

if reliability is what you are looking for, you won’t find it in Powerline. I was an early adapter with the first powerline standards (20mbps) and went all the way to the TrentNet 1500mbps adapters…all of them have been either slow, ran into high latency issues, drops connectivity a few times a day, or worse (i had PowerLineAV adapters die when lightning storms hit the area - don’t forget that those adapters cannot work with line filtering/surge protectors). If you want reliability, you are better off with dropping fiber and installing media converters instead.

 

[Stephan]

Used to run powerline for backup into just such a cellar compartment. Devolo 1200 something something. Speed got slower and slower until I realized that with every firmware update they were excluding more and more bands because of interference in long and short wave. Bad news for DSL lines too. And radio amateurs. Looked at it with SDR... bad, really bad. Because your entire power grid will radiate off the RF energy.

Too far and too many walls for wifi? If you only need IoT to read some sensor or send a command to the dryer I recommend LoRa. Sensitivity down to -148dBm (2.4 kbps) with a simple 2 dBi dipole antenna. Up to 62.2 kbps for the usual SX127x chips at 868 MHz, or if you need even better concrete penetration maybe go for a 433 MHz version.

You will have to get creative to run TCP/IP over the link, but see here: lorapipe/lorapipe.1.md at master · jgoerzen/lorapipe

 

[dswartz]

There is not. Powerline is pretty generic. If you have throughput issues, it is literally in your wiring.

I have cat 5 running on my baseboards because powerline was not good enough.

Chris

Our house is from the 60's or 70's and has some, well, interesting wiring decisions someone made back then. I'd not be surprised if the occasional glitches are due to sh*tty wiring.

 

[rhagu]

Hi,

thank you all for your comments!

@cesmith9999:
Sad to hear, but thanks for the information, I would prefer CAT 5/7 cableing over powerline as well.

@WANg:
My expectations of powerline products was not really high, at least in comparison to fiber or copper.
I live in an apartment building and my apartment is rented, so there is sadly no way I could add some cableing on my own. In my parents place i used CAT7 cableing all the way, so I am aware of the differences. I honestly do not need either high bandwith, low latency or continuous connections, it doesnt really matter if I miss one mqtt message, but the powerline connection should at least "heal" itself after a disconnect, which is something my AVM products dont seem to be able to do :-( .

@Stephan:
Thanks for the hint, I flashed Tasmota onto this device: Nous A1 Power Monitoring Plug Configuration for Tasmota and it works great, as I have one left I would like ot use it in my cellar, to monitor my washing machine. I guess I would probably need some kind of adapter to receive the messages via wifi and turn them into LoRa signals, do you have any ideas how to do this? Probably raspberry pi + Adafruit RFM95W LoRa Radio Transceiver Breakout - 868 or 915 MHz and some python programming?

@dswartz:
The apartment complex I live in was build about 8 years ago, so wiring "should" actually be pretty up to the newest standards, I had some problems with AVM powerline products before, so I hoped they were known for bad adapters and some other manufacturers would be better :-(

 

[WANg]

@WANg:
My expectations of powerline products was not really high, at least in comparison to fiber or copper.
I live in an apartment building and my apartment is rented, so there is sadly no way I could add some cableing on my own. In my parents place i used CAT7 cableing all the way, so I am aware of the differences. I honestly do not need either high bandwith, low latency or continuous connections, it doesnt really matter if I miss one mqtt message, but the powerline connection should at least "heal" itself after a disconnect, which is something my AVM products dont seem to be able to do :-( .

@dswartz:
The apartment complex I live in was build about 8 years ago, so wiring "should" actually be pretty up to the newest standards, I had some problems with AVM powerline products before, so I hoped they were known for bad adapters and some other manufacturers would be better :-(

Well, depending on the terms of your lease, you might be able to just attach fiber (like the singlemode OS2 that I use) using command strips/pads and hide it under the moldings. As for the line conditions, it depends on multiple factors like whether you have dishwashers, fridges, microwave ovens or anything that throws noise onto the circuit. Also, the same also applies when it came to your neighbors - their circuits can also throw noise onto your circuit breaker box. So just because it's new wiring doesn't imply a good working environment for powerline.

 

[LodeRunner]

It will also be subject to any inductive interference as well, along with the quality of the terminations and the breaker panel, assuming it's crossing circuits between rooms. New wiring doesn't mean the contractor did an amazing job, just means they probably did good enough to keep it from burning down.

Outlets in rooms are most commonly daisy-chained to a single home run as well, so if your adapter is plugged into the end of a chain in a given room, it's crossing all the splices or outlets upstream from it.

 

[dswartz]

It will also be subject to any inductive interference as well, along with the quality of the terminations and the breaker panel, assuming it's crossing circuits between rooms. New wiring doesn't mean the contractor did an amazing job, just means they probably did good enough to keep it from burning down.

Outlets in rooms are most commonly daisy-chained to a single home run as well, so if your adapter is plugged into the end of a chain in a given room, it's crossing all the splices or outlets upstream from it.

Our house wiring is pretty bad. I wanted to put a powerline converter up on a ledge in our dining room (cathedral ceiling). There is an outlet there, that does work (for lightbulbs at least lol), but the powerline converter keeps puking and resetting, so I gave up.