Powerline adapter "powerline" LED flashing red then green - no conneciton
I've got three of the TL-PA9020P (AV2000) powerline adapters set up in my home. They have all been working fine (for the most part) for the better part of the year. Then, yesterday, two of them dropped off the network. The "powerline" LED on both of them is flashing red then green. There is not set rhythm to the flashing either - it seems random, but it is frequent. In the tpPLC program I only see one powerline adapter, which is the one without this problem. I've tried re-pairing them with no success. Any input is appreciated. Thanks.
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Will be interesting to see what happens. I have two concerns:
- What causes this? Surely over a period of weeks or months every combination of things in my house have been on and off, but Powerline stays up. Then, one day, it's dead.
- Even though I have the LED's active, none of my Powerline adapters are where a red LED is especially noticable. (behind furniture, under a desk, behind brooms and mops in the garage, etc. When I DO notice it has gone down, I may have lost several days of security camera recordings. My cameras do not respond to ICMP (ping), so I will have to invest time in finding a network monitoring program that works by HTTP connects or something like that. The easiest monitoring tools to set up use ICMP and it's tricky setting up tools that open web pages and look for specific characters.
Thanks for participating in this forum.
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I had this across my 4 powerline adapters yesterday, to fix it I pressed and held the pair button for around 10 seconds, then all the leds went off except for the power one. I then paired them all again, issue is
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Hi everyone, I've been having this problem for years now!
Every few weeks I notice a crappy network connection, I look at the adapters and sure enough they're flashing with an intermittant red light. So I have to go around the house resetting each one (4 of them) by holding the pair button down for about 15 seconds and them go round a second time to pair them all up again. Its frustrating but I've accepted that as a part of life now as help from TP-link went nowhere, I've just decided I won't be buying any more of their products in the future.
There was an old long thred on this, which I'll have to try and find again. But the concensus was that TP-link have not updated the firmware for the chipset that runs the AV-2000 connection (that was more than a year ago). Other maufacturers which use the same chipset manage to create much more stable connections with newer firmware but for whatever reason TP-link havent updated theirs.
I've tried loads of fixed including adding ferrite cores to all the power cables which are plugged into the wall sockets but any perceved improvement was a short lived placebo at best.
Perhaps with some renewed effort we can get some answers from them!
Link to one of the many other threads on the subject: https://community.tp-link.com/en/home/forum/topic/96545?page=5
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@VirtualBrown thanks to you and to everyone else who's still keeping this thread going. The issue is driving me crazy... I'm not sure if I really want to HOPE I get to your point -- where I just accept it as part of life -- but it'll be an improvement over the current situation!
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"I've tried loads of fixed including adding ferrite cores to all the power cables which are plugged into the wall sockets"
Can you provide a link to the ferrite cores you used and where I can purchase some? I am experimenting with using surge protector, EMI/RFI filters to isolate devices. They are clunky and inconvenient. Ferrite cores would be a LOT more convenient, unless it requires cutting cables to install them.
My premonition is that "nothing will help". There is something amiss in the 65 year old wiring hidden in my walls that is working against me. When every wire nut, every electrical outlet, every screw post can be a source of problems, I am sure to lose. I discovered when doing some minor work that the builder saved 50 cents on every outlet by using the "stab in" connections on the back of outlets to eliminate installing pigtails and those stab-in's eventually work loose. There's also not enough room in those old electrical boxes to stuff in the outlet "in and out" wiring, plus a pigtail.
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Hi, yeah sure these are the ones I bought:
They fit really nicely, good quality and the shop let me swap a few black ones for grey in the 10 pack to match my cables.
Good luck with your wiring!
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I may be confused, but it may be that we need to find ferrite cores that attenuate the correct range of frequencies. On the data sheet from Rich Electronics, it says the frequency range is 50MHz to 500MHz. Wikipedia shows the frequencies used by HomePlug AV2 as 2-30MHz and 30-86MHz. So, I think we need EMI filtering starting at 2MHz.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomePlug#HomePlug_AV
I wish more sellers would provide links to the actual specs. It looks like most of their products have impedance down to 1MHz, but at a significantly lower level that at higher frequencies.
I ordered a package from Amazon, of course having no knowledge of any actual specifications. Will probably start clamping them on things to see if anything changes. I can afford to waste $10 and the exercise will do me good.
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The problem is the firmware from the year 2018 in the TL-PA9020 powerline adapters which has bugs.
No newer firmware is available and will propably released from Broadcom for the powerline chip to
solve the bugs which they know. Before the 2018 firmware with some little stability fixes the
problems were by the tplink service put on the user regarding misconfiguration. Please use the
AV1200 or AV1300 power line adapters with QCA7500 or QCA7550 chip from Qualcom Atheros which has
released latest firmware this year 2020 and has no problems with the low speed many experience with
the TL-PA9020 AV2000. So the AV1200s and AV1300s are faster during use than the AV2000s power line
adapters.
I had two TL-PA9020, contacted some years ago the TPL-Link service and they gave me recommendations
which did not work and are for an experienced power line user nonsense. So I had given back both
adapters to the seller. Since 13 years I use powerline adapter and never had used such crap adapters
such as the TL-PA9020 AV2000. These adapters cost a lot of life time the users and lead to
electronic waste at many users. These adapters should be taken from the market until the since many
years open bugs are solved. The firmware from 2018 did improve stability a little bit and before the
2017 firmware was horrible with much more connection problems. It is no business for Broadcom to
develop new chips or improve existing software. tplink just puts the software on the adapters.
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Thank you for the explanation. Would you by chance know of a way to determine if any AV2000 adapters (from which manufacturers) use Atheros chipsets instead of Broadcom? I am streaming a bunch of IP cameras and HD tv over Powerline and would rather use an AV2000 (from somebody) if it "worked reliably."
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