Homeplug to shop

[jwdrew22]

I'm fairly new to the powerline ethernet stuff. But I have researched it online and decided it was the best method to get internet access to my shop outbuilding. The outbuilding has 220 and 110V ran from the house panel through buried conduit (two 90A legs) and it worked fine at first with two Cisco/Linksys PLE400 adapters. I'm about 150' away from the house and I was getting decent internet speed and connectivity. Then the other night we had some rain and that next morning I started to loose the connection between the two adapters. I reset them a few times and eventually they would no longer link up. I can't imagine and moisture in the conduit causing a problem otherwise I'd have breakers tripping and a short circuit of some sort.

So I ran an extension cord from the house out to the shop and I'm working off of it for now. My thought is to run an isolated circuit (dedicated 110V) out here through the conduit. I would pull some ethernet cable through, but from I understand you can't even use CAT6E shielded cable without interference being so close to the power lines.

Any thoughts on what might be causing the issue before I spend the money and time on running an dedicated line?

Thanks!

 

[thiggins]

Your problem does seem moisture related. If the lines are wet, line to line impedance could certainly change enough to affect the high frequency HomePlug signals, but not enough to trip GFI.

If you run another line and put it in the same conduit, you may get the same problem if you don't find and fix the source of the moisture leak.

But if you're going to pull another line, I'd pull a CAT cable. AC fields may impair performance a bit. But you're certainly going to get higher and more reliable throughput with impaired Ethernet than with the best powerline signal.