Can a moca poe filter be affected by a storm surge?

[Chloe123]

So a while back a surge devastated pretty much everything that was connected to our coaxial lines, including the simple moca setup I had going (screen beam moca adapter split of modem coax and plugged into our router on one end, moca straight from coax to my computer on the other end, my room.) Router, modem, moca adapters have all been replaced, yet they still don't work like they used to. Now when my adapters are hooked up to the coax network the internet goes out for everyone and when connected to the wifi it says "connected without internet". Today I tried messing with things again but this time I tried removing the moca filter I had installed at the main coax splitter in our basement. It seemed to greatly improve download speeds and latency,  leading me to ask the question "could the surge have affected the filter?"

A few side notes: I am aware that the moca being on the same coax line as the modem could degrade things, but this all worked fine before.

                          : I am getting an off gassing surge protector to hopefully avoid this in the future.  

 

Thank you for reading and any help is much appreciated!

[emosun]

if removing the filter resulted in only a large improvement , it would stand to reason the filter was either bad or not useful

[Chloe123]

36 minutes ago, emosun said:

if removing the filter resulted in only a large improvement , it would stand to reason the filter was either bad or not useful

I ordered a new one. I hope it solves the network degradation issue when the moca is connected. will update once tried.

 

I just didn't know if a surge could break those filters. if I had known I would have tried a lot sooner.

 

 

 

[Donut417]

7 hours ago, Chloe123 said:

I just didn't know if a surge could break those filters. if I had known I would have tried a lot sooner.

 

Be it Coax or Ethernet they are both made out of copper or copper clad aluminum. Either way those cables can and will conduct electricity. Thats why your cable/telephone providers will ground their connections outside your home, they provide a path to ground to provide lighting and other electricity a suggestion to get to ground. 

[emosun]

On 8/7/2022 at 11:29 AM, Chloe123 said:

I just didn't know if a surge could break those filters. if I had known I would have tried a lot sooner.

well lightning can explode trees so i don;t think your coax line is going to be much of a challenge

[Alex Atkin UK]

7 hours ago, emosun said:

well lightning can explode trees so i don;t think your coax line is going to be much of a challenge

Yeah I would have thought it common sense that ANYTHING conductive can be destroyed by lightening, and it can travel quite far down the chain of things connected.

 

When our chimney got hit, it fried all landline phones, the answerphone, blew a neon in a fused switch, left a cloud of smoke near the fuse box, blew up my modem, fried every network card, blew up the motherboard the modem was plugged into (leaving a charred hole in the IO chip, back before this was integrated into the main chipset).  Though ironically it didn't break the coax terminators in that case, as this was an old coax network back in the dialup days.

 

This is one reason I wanted FTTP ASAP, one less place for lightening to get in as my network is a lot more expensive than it was back then.  Its why I don't like cables method of FTTP, as they still convert to coax in a box outside which could be susceptible to lightening.

[Chloe123]

On 8/8/2022 at 9:19 PM, emosun said:

well lightning can explode trees so i don;t think your coax line is going to be much of a challenge

well the actual coax lines are fine and NOT exploded so I don't think it was too erroneous of me to think that a filter would be much different... thanks for your... help... 

 

if all you're going to do is make the assumptions based on this one case that I can without the actual specific knowledge of this equipment it would be more useful for you not to respond and save clutter on the forum.  

[Chloe123]

I bought a new filter and it seems to have worked for now!  so for anyone getting frustrated by not finding a straight forward answer on google (like I was) yes! the surge can render your moca POE filter ineffective. the signal still passed through in my case, but the filter was no longer filtering. Hope this helped! 

[Chloe123]

On 8/9/2022 at 4:45 AM, Alex Atkin UK said:

Yeah I would have thought it common sense that ANYTHING conductive can be destroyed by lightening, and it can travel quite far down the chain of things connected.

 

When our chimney got hit, it fried all landline phones, the answerphone, blew a neon in a fused switch, left a cloud of smoke near the fuse box, blew up my modem, fried every network card, blew up the motherboard the modem was plugged into (leaving a charred hole in the IO chip, back before this was integrated into the main chipset).  Though ironically it didn't break the coax terminators in that case, as this was an old coax network back in the dialup days.

 

This is one reason I wanted FTTP ASAP, one less place for lightening to get in as my network is a lot more expensive than it was back then.  Its why I don't like cables method of FTTP, as they still convert to coax in a box outside which could be susceptible to lightening.

A poe filter is a tiny passive piece of equipment that doesn't look too different from a regular head of a coax cable. Because of its passive nature, I didn't initially assume that it would have been affected by a surge. I'm glad I thought to check it.

 

 

[Alex Atkin UK]

9 hours ago, Chloe123 said:

A poe filter is a tiny passive piece of equipment that doesn't look too different from a regular head of a coax cable. Because of its passive nature, I didn't initially assume that it would have been affected by a surge. I'm glad I thought to check it.

Passive only means its using energy within the cable (or blocking it as a filter is designed for). All electrical component have a breakdown voltage where slightly above it might not damage them, but something like lightening can completely destroy them.

Brick is not normally conductive, but it still took a chunk of it off my chimney when it hit, as the voltage is so high.  Anything can become conductive if the voltage is high enough, but not for very long if it has a high resistance as it will be destroyed.  So if my fibre line got hit, it might melt it where it hit, but the resistance would be too high for it to travel down it into the house.

It might however fry WiFi and mobile devices by overloading their radios, but probably not as they're tuned to very specific frequencies.  When I got hit it did fry the next door neighbours satellite LNB which was on the opposite side of the house.

[Chloe123]

1 hour ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

Passive only means its using energy within the cable (or blocking it as a filter is designed for). All electrical component have a breakdown voltage where slightly above it might not damage them, but something like lightening can completely destroy them.

Brick is not normally conductive, but it still took a chunk of it off my chimney when it hit, as the voltage is so high.  Anything can become conductive if the voltage is high enough, but not for very long if it has a high resistance as it will be destroyed.  So if my fibre line got hit, it might melt it where it hit, but the resistance would be too high for it to travel down it into the house.

It might however fry WiFi and mobile devices by overloading their radios, but probably not as they're tuned to very specific frequencies.  When I got hit it did fry the next door neighbours satellite LNB which was on the opposite side of the house.

You're missing my point entirely.

 

My point was that it was a yes or no question. the responses I got were either sarcastic or rude. (including yours)

 

I fixed my problem (by myself) and hopefully this thread will help someone who was in the same situation as I was.

 

goodbye

[Alex Atkin UK]

5 hours ago, Chloe123 said:

You're missing my point entirely.

 

My point was that it was a yes or no question. the responses I got were either sarcastic or rude. (including yours)

 

I fixed my problem (by myself) and hopefully this thread will help someone who was in the same situation as I was.

 

goodbye

I'm sorry about the "common sense" comment, admittedly I could have replied without needing to be insulting, or not replied at all.