Came across this issue recently after having some work done on my house to put in new electrical circuits to load balance my home office for some new equipment and thought I’d share in case anyone runs into this in the future. About 2 weeks ago I had some electrical work done on my house and had two new outlet drops added in my home office so I can install some much needed equipment. Together with that I also got a new breaker box installed to expand the capacity for future expansion if and when needed.
For some reason it seems like there was some interference from the new drops that was causing networking not to work at all. Once I moved things back to an older outlet, it started working again. I know… WTH??? I had the same reaction.
I did some investigation on my end and it seems that there was something somewhere interfering with networking signals across my networking gear. At first I thought a surge in voltage but nothing seems to be overheating or flaking in any way and there was no shorting happening no matter what I plugged in. Through the investigations as noted earlier, I tried moving hardware to both new outlets as well as a different outlet in the same room and both the new outlets did the same thing.
After a few days of looking into things on my end I spoke the contractor and explained my thoughts and findings and we agreed that there should be something electrical causing this so we tried turning off one of the breakers and guess what? Things worked just fine. We switched over to the other breaker and things again worked fine. We left one breaker off until the electrician could come in and look into it. It was agreed that someone would come in a few days to do some testing, so we wait.
I got someone out quickly and they did some voltage testing and it seems like all was well but we did confirm that when both breakers were in the on position at the same time, my equipment power on but networking does not work. Once one breaker is turned off it started working again. Once again we left one breaker powered off and things functioning.
The electrician explained to me that when they installed the two outlets there was as normally done, one neutral shared between both and this seems to have cause some cross talk happening so we scheduled yet another appointment for the crew to come back out and run another neutral so each outlet can be a unique circuit. That day came and went and things have remained stable.
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