Leaving aside the downsides of Power Line Adapters, I do have a spare pair (courtesy of VM) and a potential use.
I have power from the house to the shed on a B40 RCBO in the main fuse board.
At the other end is the old (pre-rewire) fuse box.
Is there anything to be gained by sharing a fused spur with the RCBO connection (that is, not relying on the PLA signal passing between RCBOs)?
Just that I have the electrician in at the moment replacing green goo wiring and this might be the time for a little extra work if there is a major benefit.
While they will work though MCBs, RCD, RCBO etc, the fewer that you need to go through the better.
IME a couple of MCBs does not have much impact - a setup I did the other day was getting ~330 Mbps with them close on the same circuit, and that dropped to ~200 Mbps with three devices spread over three storeys on three different circuits.
Going thought more devices, and RCD type devices in particular, has more impact. My link to my workshop is only just about functional and perhaps gets 10 Mbps, but that is through MCB, RCD, Henley, RCD, Fuse, Submain, RCD, MCB.
Yes my thoughts too, a huge long interference generator is what you will have otherwise. I feel sure some better kind of signal packaging could make these devices less RFI nightmares to everything radio. Brian
Domestically, I have had no end of problems over the past 15 years with any non-wired networking connection. And since the whole ****ing point of wanting my machines on a network is to be able to access them remotely, so they can be shoved in a cupboard, it's a f****ng PITA to invariably end up having to find a monitor, etc, to work out what the problem is.
Yes, Cat 5 is always the *best* solution, but it is often not the easiest, as it involves drilling through walls (maybe masonry), routing the cable alongside carpets (to make it as inconspicuous as possible) and under metal strips in doorways, and maybe scrabbling around in a hot loft, perching on beams and lifting the glass wool insulation. And there is always the problem of how you feed a cable through a ceiling: you want to run the cable as close to the wall, maybe in the corner between two walls, but you can't get a drill right into the corner, either from below or from above.
In our new house, the wifi in the router was woefully inadequate. After looking in the loft and finding very low rafters, and about 3 feet of glass wool which made it precarious to move from one beam to the next (feel your way gingerly to make sure your foot is on a beam!), I abandoned the idea of running Cat 5. I could have drilled through the outside walls to run the cable under the eaves, but that is a nasty job, especially as you need to make all holes big enough to pass an RJ45 plug (I experimented once with a crimping tool and found it impossible to get all the wires into the right holes in the socket at the same time: I'd crimp and find that one of the wires hadn't quite been caught by the IDC so I had to start all over again. Anything smaller than a 3-pin mains plug is just too fiddly ;-) (is that a sign of old age?)
I tried a Powerline device but even that didn't have a strong enough wifi to cover all the house that wasn't covered by the router, and I discovered that the range of the Powerline technology was so poor (intermittent dropouts and generally very slow speed) that there was no point even thinking about getting a second device to cover the wifi dead zone of the first device.
So I bit the bullet and bought mesh wifi devices (Linksys Velop) which are brilliant, though the range of each one at 5 GHz (as used for the backhaul connection back to the router) is not brilliant so we needed a lot more than estimated for a typical house.
Wifi works fine here. I even let my back neighbour use my wifi. At one time I had to have a wifi repeater half way down her back yard, powered on an extension cord from my place, under an upturned bucket with a brick on it.
That Medion wifi repeater was a bit temperamental which is hardly surprising given that the temperature under the bucket would swing from -5C to 50C+, well outside its rating. Always a power cycle got it going again. Then it died, which again isnt very surprising. I brought it inside to have a look if it was easy to fix and was surprised when she thanked me for fixing it so quickly.
Turned out that the new Technicolor router did wifi so much better that she now gets a very decent signal inside her house 100M from the router, thru two concrete block walls at my place and one window at her place.
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