Back when HA’s son was coming for a visit, we discovered our front yard was a big WiFi notspot on the property. That’s a problem, because it includes the new garage where he was going to be staying and, well, you know how young people are about their internet access. (I’m worse, of course, but in me it’s an admirable quality.) I addressed the issue after I found a WiFi access point and router for $3 at the transfer station.
The $3 router didn’t have a power supply, but I had a workable one in my trash pile collection of valuable computer components. I decided to mount the router on the outside wall of the house, but we don’t have any electrical outlets there. The solution I used was not only inelegant, it was downright ugly.
Of course, this was all just temporary while we had visitors, but we discovered how useful it was to have good WiFi in the front yard. There is no cell phone coverage here (despite all the carriers’ maps promising otherwise), so we do all our calling via WiFi. If you wandered to the front yard or garage while on a call, you’d lose it. I have also been spending a lot of time working in the garage getting our catchment water system and laundry equipment up and running, and it’s nice to be able to monitor things like the solar plant while I’m working out there. So the temporary router and its ugly power cord stayed.
Since I had decided to hard-wire the router rather than use WiFi mesh technology, I had run an Ethernet cable under the house to the router. There is a technology known as Power over Ethernet (PoE) that puts a limited amount of power directly on the Ethernet cable. Could this power my router? I use PoE for the security cameras down by the studio, and was thinking about the same for here at the house, so it occurred there might be a way to use PoE for the router. There is! I found this $14 PoE splitter that passes through the data while providing 12 volt power over the same connector that my router uses. No soldering required!
At the head end, I had to add a switch to provide the PoE, which will also handle the cameras when I install them.
I was able to take this mess, with an extension cord coming out through a window, draped along the house to a power supply in a plastic bag, with the power cable running on to the router in another plastic bag:
And simplify it to this mess:
Okay, okay. It’s still ugly. But now there’s only one cable leading to the router, and that comes from under the house where it belongs. I have an IP-rated enclosure on order that will get rid of the Ziploc bag and there will just be the enclosure with a single CAT-6e outdoor-rated cable running to it. Beauty restored.
—2p
PS: To those asking “if you ran an Ethernet cable under the house, couldn’t you just as easily have run and extension cord?” I want to point out that this is an 111 year old all-wood house, and I try hard to limit things such as long outdoor extension cords that could become a fire hazard over time. The fire risk from a PoE Cat-6e outdoor cable is minimal.