Home network set up changes

A week ago I started having issues with my home network, a network that I had built up and improved over the years.

The first step in this was when we moved to this house and BT provided us with a couple of Powerline networking sockets. This allowed us to run a simple network between the router and the BT YouView box across our mains electric circuit. Usually this happens with wifi but because half of our house is over 200 years old that didn't work.

Powerline

I love the idea of Powerline. It utilises the mains cabling in your house to network across, saving the cost of installing dedicated ethernet cables. It isn't quite as good a dedicated ethernet cabling, and can be subject to interference, but you do get gigabyte speeds across it.

The Powerline adapters that BT provided were made in Kent by a small firm which closed down. I managed to buy three second hand ones on ebay and built up a network across the house for our workstations and a raid drive. It all worked fantastically well except for the wifi coverage, used by our phones which would switch to 4G without us realising. That caused issues with data allowances.

So in time I upgraded our Powerline network with 5 Devolo Magic 2 adapters. Each of these adapters also had wifi so I was able to mesh the whole house on the same wifi network. And all was good.

Except it wasn't.

Outages

In the evenings we would get outages on the network. I could see the led on the Devolo next to the TV turn red for a few seconds. If we were watching any streaming service on the TV it would then buffer. This also caused issues with the wifi network as that would also stop for no apparent reason - though the reason was the devolo's had lost connection with the router.

Split the wifi in two

Eventually I had to split the wifi network into two. I got a BT Wifi Disk and extended the wifi but that still only covered about two thirds of the house (it's not that big either!).

We lived with this set up for several years. I'd have to reboot the Devolo networks in the evening, using my iphone, and that stopped the buffering.

A week ago the devolo network stopped connecting altogether and I spent a couple of days trying to work out what the issue was. And failed.

Lightning killed the ethernet ports

We had replaced our router due to a lightning strike that knocked out the ethernet ports in the past. I thought that might have happened again and got the hub replaced again. BT suggested they send us another Wifi disk to extend the range. I thought we could only have one wifi Disk but you can have up to three!

Wifi to the rescue

Having added the extra Wifi disk we now have wifi across the whole house and a lot of the garden. This will make mowing while listening to Test Match Special possible.

I have removed all the Devolo Powerline adapters and we now run everything through wifi. I might be saving a bit on the electrical bill as well as the Devolos do run very hot. Internet searches have suggested that this may cause issues with them.