TL-PA4010 not connecting over 200m distance
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I am trying to set up a pair of TL-PA4010 units to reach my well house, approximately 500 feet (<200m) away. The units are installed directly on the 220V power lines to the well and locally. If I test the units by placing both in the same building, they work fine. Power-saving mode is turned off on both units.
However, when the remote unit is installed at the well, there is no communications. There are no surge protectors anywhere in the system. This is well below the rated 300m distance - why aren't they working?
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Are the devices connected to the same electrical circuit? Breaker boxes will prevent the signal from traveling between circuits. I would imagine that the long distance that has to be traveled on top of the signal having to travel between circuits could prevent the boxes from communicating with each other,
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@Riley_S Well, no. I have one of the units plugged (via a scary adapter cord I made) into a 220 applicance outlet next to the breaker panel. Another 220V breaker in that panel feeds a sub-panel in a guest house, in which is another 220V breaker going out to the well house. The other unit is hard-wired into a control box by the well, across the 220V well motor breaker.
I'm trying to understand why the breaker panel itself would block the signal. The only reason I can think of is that there is a small coil in each breaker (to provide the high-speed gross over-curent trip), and the inductance of that coil could be blocking the high-frequency carrier. However, tests within the building containing the breaker panel (but on different circuits) seemed to work OK. Another test however, going only to the intermediate guest house sub-panel, also failed to connect.
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It is possible to use a PLC across a circuit breaker, but many breakers have a filter that will disrupt the connection. The latency that you will experience will be much higher as it has to travel along a much longer distance of wire.
Since your breaker seems to properly pass a signal between circuits through your testing, I have a feeling that the problem lies with the adapter connection that you made. PLCs are finicky when it comes to power lines, such as how a surge protector can see the frequencies as "dirty power" and filter it out. That's why we recommend plugging them directly into the wall and not even through an extension cord. Is it possible to change this setup to use a normal outlet, as the appliance outlet is also a likely cause
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@Riley_S Thank you for your considered response! I'm pretty sure that my little adapter isn't the issue - it's just a one-foot length of the female end cut from an extension cord wired directly into a 220V dryer plug - not exactly UL-approved, but an adequate bodge for my test case. Data rate and latency were never issues, because the remote device is only 10-base-T, and I only need small bits of data exchanged (it's a controller, not a camera or anything like that).
The arrangement that I'm trying to get the signal through is <Main panel> -- 150' -- <Sub-panel> -- ~350' -- <Well house>, and it's my thought that something (my current hypothesis is the magnetic trip coils in the breakers) is attenuating the high-frequency carrier in each panel. Within the same building, and only jumping over two breakers, there's still enough signal for it to work. However, the whole path, with many more breakers (220V plug breaker, feed breaker to sub-panel, disconnect breaker in sub-panel, feed breaker to well house, well controls breaker), is just too much signal loss, I could bypass the breakers with capacitors, but this has a number of down-sides, not the least of which that it's against code to have any active circuitry in the breaker panels.
Since it seems unlikely that I'll get the PLC modems to work in this application, I've abandoned this approach, and am using a radio link instead. I have an equipment room that's currently unserviced by hard wire in the main house, so I'll use the PLCs for that (much more their intended use case...)
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@Eldon Please read this post with all responses: https://community.tp-link.com/us/home/forum/topic/204238
Here you find pib files https://www.dropbox.com/sh/hvl9jx1bj82xpne/AACdnHJIMq1ZD9gkHDlB_ykoa?dl=0 . But you can as well save your pib file the following way: https://community.tp-link.com/us/home/forum/topic/553172?replyId=1101924
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