Networking Problem

[aesculus]

I picked the Pharos CPE210 after lots of attempts with various devices including mesh systems. It's very powerful and its penetrating 6 walls (two with foil insulation).

I think with the Netgear extender as an Ethernet port I will have it covered. I now have 4 wireless systems covering my 10 acres and are starting to compete with some of my neighbors who are also saturating the airwaves.

 

[jboy210]

I would suggest either a mesh system like stated above or UniFi AC LR AP ( Ubiquiti - UniFi® AP AC LR) this is a long range access point that I use to connect my MS thats about 150' feet away through multiple interior walls.

We use Ubiquiti AC Pro Access Points throughout our house, but I questions whether they would help.

The picture below shows our set up. We power the AC Pro AP with POE. The signal is very strong to cars in the garage. But, we still have weak signal on the other side of this wall where the Powerwall gateway box is located.

Fortunately (thanks Ubiquiti!), the AC Pro has 2 Ethernet ports, one runs to the upstream switch that provides the POE. The other port send data downstream to another device, which In our case is the 8-port switch. The switch has 2 downstream devices connected over Ethernet. The little black box on the wall is the Tesla Gateway that talks to the inverters which are on the outside wall. The way too long white cable tacked to the wall goes through the wall to the PowerWall gateway located on the outside of the house.

This current set up is temporary. We are going to leave the switch, but redo the wall board to match the color and texture of the wall were the PowerWalls are located. And also replace the Ethernet cables with proper length cables and hide the cables in the walls where we can.

 

[zƬesla]

@jboy210 – Is that the Gateway 2? We're getting a new PowerWall install and were informed that we have to use GW 1 as GW 2 is too small for U.S. installations.

 

[jboy210]

@jboy210 – Is that the Gateway 2? We're getting a new PowerWall install and were informed that we have to use GW 1 as GW 2 is too small for U.S. installations.

Hi. No, that little black box is the Tesla Gateway specifically for communicating with the inverters.

On the outside wall is the PowerWall Gateway (GW 1) that is now being replaced in Europe with the Gateway 2. The white Ethernet cable passes through the wall and into an opening on the bottom of the GW1 box.

 

[zƬesla]

Hi. No, that little back box is the Tesla Gateway specifically for communicating with the inverters.

On the outside wall is the PowerWall Gateway (GW 1) that is now being replaced in Europe with the Gateway 2. The white Ethernet cable passes through the wall and into a opening on the bottom of the GW1 box.

Ah! Somehow I missed that there are two gateways. Thanks.

 

[miimura]

The thin black one is only for Tesla Solar.

 

[PBBear]

We use Ubiquiti AC Pro Access Points throughout our house, but I questions whether they would help.

Seriously - the Ubiquiti gear is good, and I use them too, but I would NOT recommend them to provide comms to a PW2 gateway.
In fact, to get a reliable connection, I had to fire up a legacy dumb access point on a different SSID just for the PW2, while running the rest of the house on Ubiquiti.

The Ubiquiti gear is too smart for the PW2. Ubiquity setups often vary their power, and 'optimise' the network by encouraging devices to connect to the closest, and periodically disconnect devices for brief moments to steer and measure their behaviour. Most devices don't notice the brief dropouts, and reconnect without any drama.

Conversely, the PW2 gateway WiFi is far too dumb and buggy for that. If the WiFi signal is interrupted (say by rebooting the access point) the PW2 gateway will often refuse to reconnect when it comes back. If you have two access points on the same SSID/password, where every other normal device will 'roam' to the other one if the first one goes dark, the PW2 gateway will not. If you log into the PW2 and force it to reconnect to the second one - and then take that one down later - it won't reconnect to the first one. The PW2 wifi is hands-down the most inflexible of any device I've seen for many years.

When I 'upgraded' the house to Ubiquiti, the PW2 was lucky to keep the connection overnight. 2 days was a stretch. a week was unobtainable.

It works fine only if you have it connected to a basic un-smart base-station with few smarts, and once connected then never ever let that access-point reboot. Fingers crossed, thats how mine stays stable - and I bank on having it offline for a while every (rare) time I have to powercycle the base-station I repurposed solely to keep the PW2 connected.

By all means run your house on Ubiquiti - but *don't* discard the old router you were using before it, you'll need it with all the smart router features disabled, as the stable wifi for the Tesla PW2. And - make sure that access point is on a power circuit that is backed-up by the PW2, so that it stays running through the grid outage, as a symbiotic pair.

My 2c learnt the hard way.

 

[bob_p]

We do have stucco - so the walls have the mesh, which will degrade WiFi signals through the wall.

NOTE if your TEG is outside and you run an ethernet cable, that can create a small security risk for your local network, since someone could access your local network by plugging a device into that cable.

For our house, decided the risk was too low to worry about...

Though if it became a concern, since the ethernet cable to the TEG goes directly to the closet with all of our networking cables/router/modem, it should be possible to isolate the TEG on its own network.

 

[jboy210]

We do have stucco - so the walls have the mesh, which will degrade WiFi signals through the wall.

NOTE if your TEG is outside and you run an ethernet cable, that can create a small security risk for your local network, since someone could access your local network by plugging a device into that cable.

For our house, decided the risk was too low to worry about...

Though if it became a concern, since the ethernet cable to the TEG goes directly to the closet with all of our networking cables/router/modem, it should be possible to isolate the TEG on its own network.

You could create a VPN to isolate your TEG from the rest of the home. I considered doing that since my switches allow me to do that on per Ethernet port basis.

But, like you I consider the risk of someone taping my cable pretty low. They would have to come into my backyard, open the TEG and pull the cable. They might as well just kick in the back door. Plus the area is under video surveillance and I walk by the gateway every day.

 

[aesculus]

Though if it became a concern, since the ethernet cable to the TEG goes directly to the closet with all of our networking cables/router/modem, it should be possible to isolate the TEG on its own network.

Good point about security. With my "extender" solution, with the ethernet cable, I am going to convert it to use my guest wifi vs my internal one.

 

[SoundDaTrumpet]

I didn't have any issues with WiFi and cellular, so me doing the following was completely voluntary, and yes it works. It is legit and even the Tesla supervisor who was there echoed the idea. He said it was unfortunate they left me on cellular despite it costing Tesla to operate on cellular. The installers aren't directed to open another company's equipment. Go figure... back to the idea:

Belden 7953A,
Ethernet Cable, Cat6E 4-pair 23awg Dual Jacket 600V

Run this from an existing available port. There are usually more than one port on the solar inverter which my SMA inverter did have. It's really a network switch built into all inverters useful for daisy chaining multiple inverters.

I ran this yes you got it right thru electrical conduit. The above Cat 6 is stiff, thick, and has the 600V sheath which is required to do this. Just don't be foolish and do this with ordinary Ethernet, else you'd be breaking a lot of rules meant to protect equipment and personnel (that's you).

The stuff is stiff and the conductors really do need the full-up CAT 6 modular jacks. Terminate the sheath to ground, and you should be good.

This hides the ethernet cable entirely. As for security, all computers at home have passwords, and I do have other security devices monitoring that area.

 

[aesculus]

I got the Netgear extender in the garage on the wall just on the other side of the TEG. I was able to run a 20 foot ethernet cable out through a cat door in the wall (now a racoon door I think) and into the TEG. I just want to experiment with this setup so I tucked the cable into some of the gaps in the false panel inside and the middle of the outside cover.

Went to my router and selected the wifi ip address of the TEG and logged in. The TEG shows that the ethernet is the one connected. The wifi one is still configured for the same SSID that I used before. Interestingly the fixed IP address for the ethernet is actually the address for the wifi but I have not renewed its lease so that is understandable. The ethernet got another one via DHCP. Hopefully that will get sorted out over the next day or so.

For those that are using ethernet but had also configured wifi at some time: Are you seeing in your router both TEG adapters connected? I can log into either IP address.

 

[jrweiss98020]

Both WiFi and Ethernet are configured here, with DHCP reservations, but only the Ethernet connection shows up currently. I assume it uses the wired connection as first priority when available.

 

[aesculus]

As predicted the wifi one disappeared overnight but the "fake" ethernet one using the extender stayed alive. It did not use the fixed address I had given it. Probably because the wifi one had stolen it before. I will have to play some games with my router to get the address fixed and/or reset the TEG.

But the good news is that this "hack" seems to be stable vs the TEG wireless piece.

 

[SoundDaTrumpet]

Both WiFi and Ethernet are configured here, with DHCP reservations, but only the Ethernet connection shows up currently. I assume it uses the wired connection as first priority when available.

I saw the same. Ethernet --> WiFi --> Cellular in that fail-over order.

Has anyone figured out how to shut off the WiFi coming out of the TEG? I assume this isn't possible unless other aggressive measures are taken like removing the WiFi antenna perhaps.

 

[jboy210]

I saw the same. Ethernet --> WiFi --> Cellular in that fail-over order.

Has anyone figured out how to shut off the WiFi coming out of the TEG? I assume this isn't possible unless other aggressive measures are taken like removing the WiFi antenna perhaps.

Removing the antenna would not prevent it from coming up. Just make the signal even flakier. There is probably a switch in the software to turn off WiFi, but unless you are Tesla, it's likely you cannot access it.

 

[aesculus]

I saw the same. Ethernet --> WiFi --> Cellular in that fail-over order.

Has anyone figured out how to shut off the WiFi coming out of the TEG? I assume this isn't possible unless other aggressive measures are taken like removing the WiFi antenna perhaps.

Well of course Tesla does this on a regular basis, hence the need for the ethernet connection.

You can block the wifi MAC address from your router/ap to keep it from connecting. Once I have the ethernet working reliably I will probably do that.

I would not want to do anything in the TEG itself because if the ethernet does fails for some reason you would not have a way to communicate with it to adjust settings etc.

 

[bmah]

I did some recon along the path where I was going to run cable between my structured wiring panel and my TEG. This is gonna be harder than I thought...it's probably not worth me trying to solve it.

Separately I was going to mention this thread, where a bunch of us used to geek out on wireless networking stuff:

Wifi Router chatter

Bruce.

 

[aesculus]

I did some recon along the path where I was going to run cable between my structured wiring panel and my TEG. This is gonna be harder than I thought...it's probably not worth me trying to solve it.

Just get the cheapest (like $40) wifi extender that has an ethernet port on it like the Netgear. Mine is totally stable now.