Internet cuts off when turning on an appliance: why it can happen to you if you have a PLC network at home and how to solve it

Local networks TODAY WE TALK ABOUT

Subscribe to Xataka Smart Home

Receive an email a day with our articles:

You are quietly watching a video, playing online, working from home in the middle of a video call or browsing the Web, and suddenly everything stops, the connection does not work and we have been isolated from the Internet. What could have happened?

As we have seen on other occasions, the reasons can be multiple. Sometimes the fault may lie outside the home and be due to a problem with our ISP, but it may also be the responsibility of our own equipment at home, especially if we have a PLC data network set up distributed throughout the rooms.

PLC or Power Line Communications networks provide us with local network connectivity through the existing electrical installation in homes and businesses. That is, PLC uses the electrical wiring in our houses to transmit digital data in addition to electrical current.

To do this, they use a series of adapters connected to the sockets in the house with greater or lesser features that may even include wireless access points to which we can connect from our mobile phones or other devices. In theory it is a very powerful technology, but in practice and depending on the specific conditions of our homes, its performance may not be as good as we would like.

Why when I put the washing machine the Internet cuts me

The strong point of PLC technology is at the same time its weakest point. Being able to take advantage of existing wiring distributed throughout the house, such as the electrical wiring, means that we can have two main problems: that the installation is very old, with a complex distribution or that is too long, and that our beloved electrical appliances introduce electromagnetic interference in the cables for the simple fact of plugging them in or using them.

Regarding the first problem, note that if our home has very old wiring, with poor insulation, the speed obtained can decrease considerably. To this we must add that for everything to work correctly it is necessary that the two PLC adapters are within the same electrical circuit of our house.

It is an annoying problem that can significantly reduce the performance of the Internet connection, but in general it will be limited and will offer a relatively stable connection even if it is not very fast.

The main problem is found in the interference caused by household appliances, and especially those that incorporate moving parts such as motors. For example the washing machine, the dishwasher and even fans or air heating systems. They produce their own residual electromagnetic signals that slip through the electrical cables, degrading the data signals of the adapters and thereby producing micro-cuts, blockages, mismatching or complete connectivity cuts.

It sounds strange, but it is quite common, especially if the appliances are a few years old or do not offer good insulation. In addition, it is usually a problem that is sometimes difficult to identify if it is another person who turns on the problematic device or it turns on by itself, such as a refrigerator, a programmed air conditioning unit, etc.

In these cases, it may be that at first we do not relate or find the cause-effect relationship between the washing machine being put to spin in the kitchen and the video of kittens that we are watching in the living room being posted.

How to solve or minimize the problem

If we have this type of problem with our PLC network at home, and since in general we are not going to change the electrical installation or even replace the problematic appliances, there are some measures that we can take to minimize or completely avoid these inconveniences:

Cover Photo | JESHOOTS.COM

Internet is cut when turning on an appliance: why it can happen to you if you have a PLC network at home and how to solve it