# Are powerline adapters safe?



## wrxxx

i assume they go through safety testing like all products. i think you will be fine


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## iARDAs

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *wrxxx*
> 
> i assume they go through safety testing like all products. i think you will be fine


YEah I know but somehow I am worried that it might give extra load to the circuits in the house and cause something









Anyway our entire electiry city cables are brand new so I hope they will be great in transfering data.


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## nleksan

I am not an electrical engineer by any stretch, but I don't think that Ethernet over Power would be in any way dangerous to your electrical wiring.

I gave it a go in my last house, which was a very nice, very modern (both in terms of age, which it was only about 10yo, and in design), was custom designed (I worked with a very nice, very talented architect) and built to my specifications (contractor specialized in unique and custom builds, and quite well known for some of his work).
The reason I bring this up is because I am absolutely an efficiency freak, I will do crazy things to eek that last tenth of a percent of whatever out of whatever.
I wasn't ready to go zero net energy at the time (next house will be), but I did shoot to exceed the highest possible efficiency rating at the time. House was built with almost all renewable materials, such as "fossilized" bamboo and wet-pack blown cellulose as primary insulation, supported by rigid foam board and vapor barriers. The R-value for all outside walls was 48, the roof was 42, and so forth.

As such, with all the tax credit and benefits, I had a lot more money than I thought (almost half the price of the house was refunded/credited!). I found out exactly how much before the house was completed, and decided to get more out of the "discount".
I had a great, talented electrician come out and we pretty well overhauled the whole electrical layout, switching to 20A breakers, significantly improved wire and stuff, whole house surge suppressor, automatic two stage backup power (immediately switch to battery/capacitor, 5ms response time; after 10min, switch to dual load based generators), whole home Ethernet, etc. It was pretty much perfect, and designed with my love of high end audio equipment in mind.

I mention this specifically because the quality of the signal achieved with Powerline networks is dependent on the quality of the electrical wiring in the walls. Anything that is not a part of the circuit, has no effect on signal, so you can have three people living next to another on the same power mains and in identical homes, but with various quality and or age of the wires in the walls will all have very different results. Same everything, clones, and it comes down.

Prior to ripping up walls to switch from CAT5 to CAT6E/CAT7E cable, I decided to give Powerline networking a go. The idea is intriguing, and I think it is one of the most promising potential advances in congestion free high speed Internet, and the only one that would be universally available.
Note that the home theater and recording "studio" were on their own circuit, and the other 4800sq-ft were divided into 3 more circuits, 20A lines, w the circuit design being the best possible compromise between load balancing and shortest wire runs. I also had a number of 220A lines, in the home theater/studio, office, kitchen, and 3 other living spaces.
Wiring used was similar to what I used for the home theater, where I ran all speaker wires behind the walls and used banana plug outlets; that was exclusively 12AWG oxygen-free copper quad-shielded flame ******ant wiring. The power wire was between 8 and 12 AWG, EMI/RFI shielded, all earth grounded, all protected by whole house (really it's whole circuit) surge suppressors, and I did the tests on a circuit without any normal UPS, no voltageregulator/power conditioner, and no power strip.

Quite frankly, it's the kind of ideal test scenario that would give a marketing agent wet dreams...

I got the four most highly regarded brands' models, a starter kit for each (converter and a single receiver). Prices ranged from $89 to $199, and all touted "600Mbps" or "Gigabit" speeds.

The equipment used to test:
Asus RT-N66U Router
Motorola Surfboard DOCSIS3 cable modem
High Speed cable line Internet from TWC (150Mbps down and 50Mbps up)
All quality CAT6E cable
Modified Rack Server (4x 1366 8-core Xeons, 96GB DDR3-2000, EVGA GTX580, LSI 9270-16i, Plextor M5P for OS, 8x 450GB Seagate Cheetah 15krpm SAS drives running RAID0 (2GB Cache in LSI card, BBU), Intel Dual 10GbEth card w dual processors, etc
Samsung Series9 Laptop w the highest end mobile i7, 32GB DDR3-1866, GTX780M, 2x 840PRO 512GB RAID0 + Seagate Momentus XT 750GB/8GB SSHD
ARECA 15-Bay RAID-NAS w full Areca hardware RAID (upgradable cache, upped to 8GB DDR3-1600; dual core RoC, and Intel Ethernet w 2x 10GbEth and 4x 1GbEth + 2x eSATA ; supports SAS/SATA6 drives), borrowed 14x Cheetah 900GB 15krpm in RAID0 all stroked to 300GB each

Transfered all kinds of stuff, from 10GB 50,000 file sets to 60GB ISO.

Min Avg Sustained Speeds: 72Mbit/s
Avg Overall Sustained Speeds: 498Mbit/s
Best Avg Sustained Speeds: 713Mbit/s

Impressive, right?

Well, tried at my ex's 1920 built house and never broke 100Mbit/s even when on the same outlet.

Verdict: still too temperamental for main source, but perfect wireless backup without the cost or hassle of running cable.
That said, I would not bother unless you know for certain you have perfect wiring. The smallest thing can cause a 600Mb speed to drop to 2Mbit.


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## iARDAs

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *nleksan*
> 
> I am not an electrical engineer by any stretch, but I don't think that Ethernet over Power would be in any way dangerous to your electrical wiring.
> 
> I gave it a go in my last house, which was a very nice, very modern (both in terms of age, which it was only about 10yo, and in design), was custom designed (I worked with a very nice, very talented architect) and built to my specifications (contractor specialized in unique and custom builds, and quite well known for some of his work).
> The reason I bring this up is because I am absolutely an efficiency freak, I will do crazy things to eek that last tenth of a percent of whatever out of whatever.
> I wasn't ready to go zero net energy at the time (next house will be), but I did shoot to exceed the highest possible efficiency rating at the time. House was built with almost all renewable materials, such as "fossilized" bamboo and wet-pack blown cellulose as primary insulation, supported by rigid foam board and vapor barriers. The R-value for all outside walls was 48, the roof was 42, and so forth.
> 
> As such, with all the tax credit and benefits, I had a lot more money than I thought (almost half the price of the house was refunded/credited!). I found out exactly how much before the house was completed, and decided to get more out of the "discount".
> I had a great, talented electrician come out and we pretty well overhauled the whole electrical layout, switching to 20A breakers, significantly improved wire and stuff, whole house surge suppressor, automatic two stage backup power (immediately switch to battery/capacitor, 5ms response time; after 10min, switch to dual load based generators), whole home Ethernet, etc. It was pretty much perfect, and designed with my love of high end audio equipment in mind.
> 
> I mention this specifically because the quality of the signal achieved with Powerline networks is dependent on the quality of the electrical wiring in the walls. Anything that is not a part of the circuit, has no effect on signal, so you can have three people living next to another on the same power mains and in identical homes, but with various quality and or age of the wires in the walls will all have very different results. Same everything, clones, and it comes down.
> 
> Prior to ripping up walls to switch from CAT5 to CAT6E/CAT7E cable, I decided to give Powerline networking a go. The idea is intriguing, and I think it is one of the most promising potential advances in congestion free high speed Internet, and the only one that would be universally available.
> Note that the home theater and recording "studio" were on their own circuit, and the other 4800sq-ft were divided into 3 more circuits, 20A lines, w the circuit design being the best possible compromise between load balancing and shortest wire runs. I also had a number of 220A lines, in the home theater/studio, office, kitchen, and 3 other living spaces.
> Wiring used was similar to what I used for the home theater, where I ran all speaker wires behind the walls and used banana plug outlets; that was exclusively 12AWG oxygen-free copper quad-shielded flame ******ant wiring. The power wire was between 8 and 12 AWG, EMI/RFI shielded, all earth grounded, all protected by whole house (really it's whole circuit) surge suppressors, and I did the tests on a circuit without any normal UPS, no voltageregulator/power conditioner, and no power strip.
> 
> Quite frankly, it's the kind of ideal test scenario that would give a marketing agent wet dreams...
> 
> I got the four most highly regarded brands' models, a starter kit for each (converter and a single receiver). Prices ranged from $89 to $199, and all touted "600Mbps" or "Gigabit" speeds.
> 
> The equipment used to test:
> Asus RT-N66U Router
> Motorola Surfboard DOCSIS3 cable modem
> High Speed cable line Internet from TWC (150Mbps down and 50Mbps up)
> All quality CAT6E cable
> Modified Rack Server (4x 1366 8-core Xeons, 96GB DDR3-2000, EVGA GTX580, LSI 9270-16i, Plextor M5P for OS, 8x 450GB Seagate Cheetah 15krpm SAS drives running RAID0 (2GB Cache in LSI card, BBU), Intel Dual 10GbEth card w dual processors, etc
> Samsung Series9 Laptop w the highest end mobile i7, 32GB DDR3-1866, GTX780M, 2x 840PRO 512GB RAID0 + Seagate Momentus XT 750GB/8GB SSHD
> ARECA 15-Bay RAID-NAS w full Areca hardware RAID (upgradable cache, upped to 8GB DDR3-1600; dual core RoC, and Intel Ethernet w 2x 10GbEth and 4x 1GbEth + 2x eSATA ; supports SAS/SATA6 drives), borrowed 14x Cheetah 900GB 15krpm in RAID0 all stroked to 300GB each
> 
> Transfered all kinds of stuff, from 10GB 50,000 file sets to 60GB ISO.
> 
> Min Avg Sustained Speeds: 72Mbit/s
> Avg Overall Sustained Speeds: 498Mbit/s
> Best Avg Sustained Speeds: 713Mbit/s
> 
> Impressive, right?
> 
> Well, tried at my ex's 1920 built house and never broke 100Mbit/s even when on the same outlet.
> 
> Verdict: still too temperamental for main source, but perfect wireless backup without the cost or hassle of running cable.
> That said, I would not bother unless you know for certain you have perfect wiring. The smallest thing can cause a 600Mb speed to drop to 2Mbit.


Thanks for the indept message buddy and a good experience to share... I am actually in a similar position. I bought my home 3 years ago and redid the entire circuits in the house. Everything is brand new and it served me well.

My PC is wired to the router and

Download is 47 MB/s
Upload is 2 MB/s
Ping is 4

Now with the powerline adopter (got the linksys one)

My download is 44 MB/s
Upload is 2 MB/s
Ping is 10

I am TRULY happy with the results and they are much better than expected.

I am thinking of getting a 2nd adapter soon.


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## brownbob06

So, just to clarify, without thread jacking:

I have a wireless router that is too far away from my room to play xbox live without a wireless network adapter, a USB extension cable, and a home made satellite dish (cardboard box with antennae from wireless network adapter sticking through it.) When I do get a connection I can game with no lag and I'm fine, but I can't connect my PC by any means and don't think the speed would be fast enough anyways.

A powerline adapter would be my best bet in this situation.

P.S.: I recently moved in with my grandparents and don't want to mess with their stuff so running an ethernet cable is out of the question as is moving the router unfortunately.

The house is old and I doubt the wiring is anything great, but there aren't a whole lot of outlets so that may help my case.


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