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Help with electical interference...

Started by sanch3x Apr 9, 2007 at 7:46 PM 2 replies 450+ views
Original Post
sanch3x
sanch3x
Hello, After I failed at finding any results on google I figured that I'd ask here. My friend and I spent all day cleaning up the basement to set up a computer room where we could game late into the night and not bother his parents. We passed wires through the ceiling to a phone jack in some other room and we got the internet to work but now we're getting lag spikes that cut us off from the net. We're thinking that we might be getting interference from the heater in the other room and we were wondering if there was a way to prevent this (like wrap the telephone wire in wool hehe)... Any help would be greatly appreciated!
CrimsonSun
CrimsonSun
I seriously doubt that a heater is causing significant interference. However, if you completely surround your wire with an insulating material, it will shield from interference (As will twisting the phone cable around the suspect interfering cable).
Yann L
Yann L
Quote:
Original post by CrimsonSun
I seriously doubt that a heater is causing significant interference. However, if you completely surround your wire with an insulating material, it will shield from interference (As will twisting the phone cable around the suspect interfering cable).

Uhm, no, not at all.

Shielding against electromagnetic interferences can be achieved by wrapping the cable with a layer of electrically conductive material (film wrapped wire nets or aluminum foil are often used) that is grounded. And twisting the phone cable around the interfering cable will of course not reduce the interference, but amplify it by an order of magnitude, as a much larger amount of energy (which decreases quadratically with distance) will be inductively transferred (close twisting can even add capacitive transfer, which adds a lot of additional harmonic interferences).

Try to use standard industry shielded cables. Shielding them yourself will most probably not work very well, and is a lot of work. That said, I doubt a heater will produce significant interference with an ADSL line. It's probably more a case of a bad contact somewhere along the phone line.
CrimsonSun
CrimsonSun
Well, I cannot believe I had such a massive brain meltdown. I meant an insulating conducting material as in a faraday's cage.

I'm so damn tired...but yeah, listen to Yann.

EDIT: God dammit I did it again...

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