Try ethernet over coaxial cable- public service announcement

[DavidA]

I have an IM 40 gallon long. As Minnesota snow birds my wife and I spend 6 weeks in Sanibel. A house sitter tends to our mini-labradoodle and the reef tank. He is dependable but not a reefer. Thus I must manage as much as possible from afar, minimize and mitigate points of failure and automate as much as possible. Recently my Apex controller has intermittently dropped its connection with Wifi. The first time the Neptune System's technician took control of my laptop and worked for 90 minutes to get back me on line. This worked for a day but the connection dropped again and this time the technician could not get me back on line and will be sending me a new unit., Interestingly, the next day the unit spontaneously reconnected to wifi and the connection has been on and off

The experience made me realize that Wifi was a significant point of failure and an ethernet connection would be preferable. Unfortunately our modem and router are in a different part of the house and I cannot directly connect the controller with the router without tearing up the walls. Understandably my wife would not approve.

Enter Moca https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_over_Coax_Alliance. Moca is a standard to enable ethernet over coaxial cable. Just so happens that there is a coaxial cable a few feet from the aquarium which we used for cable TV before we "cut the cord." After upgrading my cable splitters to > 1000 mhz ($5 per splitter) and a call to Xfinity to activate the cable close to the aquarium I set up one Trendnet Moca adapter to the wifi router and a 2nd adapter connected to the cable by the aquarium.

And magic.... the apex is now connected via ethernet and the wifi point of failure eliminated! I attached a photo of the small adapter. If you worry about the Wifi connection to your controller and you can't directly run ethernet from your router to the controller, try a Moca adapter

 

[Reef Jedi]

That’s a pretty cool idea! Have you ever looked into Orbi systems?

 

[DavidA]

That’s a pretty cool idea! Have you ever looked into Orbi systems?

I believe Orbi is the Netgear MESH. I looked into MESH but discovered that MESH simply is a way to boost your Wifi signal at different points in your house. MESH does not enable a direct ethernet connection (though you could probably put an ethernet cable into a Mesh point, you are still relying on wifi to get the signal to that point). My problem was not the strength of the Wifi signal- it was an intrinsic instability of the apex controller in handling the wifi signal. I have read that others have encountered problems with the stability of apex when using wifi.

With Moca, I have hard wiring (coaxial cable plus ethernet) from my router to the controller. Hurray!

 

[SixlineRyan]

Just to add some caveats, make sure to install a MoCA filter if your coax is connected to the outside world. Otherwise your signal isn't secure and your network traffic can bleed up the line and cause issues for your neighbors if they still have any sort of coax service. MoCA can also interfere with satellite TV if you have that service.