It can't possibly be the coupler . . . .

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stevenkan

stevenkan

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  • #1
    One of my POE trail cameras went offline, two days ago. As I was thinking of all the possible points of failure, I mentally ruled out the "waterproof" coupler that I have in the middle of the long run, where I changed my mind on camera wiring 2 years ago.

    Well, after 3 hours of troubleshooting, testing with inexplicable results, and at least 6 unnecessary reterminations at the far ends . . . it's the coupler:

    1716670975332.png

    The inside was soaking wet, and the RJ45 pins had lots of green corrosion.

    I reterminated with a different brand of coupler, and used lots of dielectric grease, which I neglected to use last time. The camera is back online. We'll see how many years this holds up for.
     
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    stevenkan

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  • #4
    Wheels Of Confusion said:
    You haven't ruled out DNS being the culprit! :judge:

    Since you've been re-terminating on both ends anyway, was there a chance to just run a straight new drop without the couplers, or to at least move the couplers to either end where they could be more sheltered?
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    80% of the length is screwed to my fence, using these clips that you recommended to me 5 years ago 🤣, so it would not be an easy pull.
     
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    MR2DI4

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  • #11
    SandyTech said:
    Yeah, grab some 3M Super 33 (or 88 if you're in a colder climate) and wrap that up.
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    Sorry, but I disagree. While 3M's 33 or 88 black vinyl electrical tapes are great products, they are NOT waterproof! They use a thin layer of rubber-based adhesive with PVC backing. The adhesive does degrade over time and will allow moisture to pass.

    Take it from someone who has worked his whole career in a town with the highest annual rainfall in the nation. I've seen several products that claim to resist exposure to water, but after years of working on cell tower connectors and numerous smaller radios and equipment using 8P8C plugs enclosed in "weather-resistant" connectors the only thing I've seen actually work to keep water out is thick butyl rubber tape. Every time we do tower work we get little rolls of 2" wide butyl rubber tape that, when applied correctly (read: stretched slightly and maintaining tension while wrapping with overlapping courses), adheres to itself and the connectors and does a great job keeping environmental moisture out. It is common to wrap 88 tape over butyl-wrapped connectors for maintaing rigidity and UV protection, but using black tape alone just isn't enough.
     
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    Lord Evermore

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  • #12
    MR2DI4 said:
    Sorry, but I disagree. While 3M's 33 or 88 black vinyl electrical tapes are great products, they are NOT waterproof! They use a thin layer of rubber-based adhesive with PVC backing. The adhesive does degrade over time and will allow moisture to pass.

    Take it from someone who has worked his whole career in a town with the highest annual rainfall in the nation. I've seen several products that claim to resist exposure to water, but after years of working on cell tower connectors and numerous smaller radios and equipment using 8P8C plugs enclosed in "weather-resistant" connectors the only thing I've seen actually work to keep water out is thick butyl rubber tape. Every time we do tower work we get little rolls of 2" wide butyl rubber tape that, when applied correctly (read: stretched slightly and maintaining tension while wrapping with overlapping courses), adheres to itself and the connectors and does a great job keeping environmental moisture out. It is common to wrap 88 tape over butyl-wrapped connectors for maintaing rigidity and UV protection, but using black tape alone just isn't enough.
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    Perhaps, but this isn't a professional installation. It's just somebody's back yard (basically). What is the cost difference between the types of tape (especially if you also need to add the black tape on top of the butyl tape), and the ease of working with the two types, and just how long a period of time are you talking about before the black tape degrades? Is it worth the extra cost and effort of using butyl tape and then covering it with 33/88 instead of just using the 33/88 tape, which you'll still need to check once a year while already passing the location and wrapping it up again if needed? Is the 33/88 tape going to go bad so often it would be a huge hassle? It's not like this is a hard-to-reach area like up on a 300 foot pole, where someone has to call out a contractor to do maintenance. I mean, you could just as easily seal the whole thing with some sort of caulk, or epoxy, and that would probably last longer than any tape.

    Of course, OP clearly wasn't looking at it once a year to make sure it was sealed, but now they know that it's a potential issue and can do so. I'd argue that wrapping it in anything just makes it harder to maintain, if it is in an easily-accessed location, since you can't really check the inside of the connector and tell if there has been any breach which you might not be able to see just looking at all the tape covering it. (But any sort of covering is likely to have some leakage over a long period. They can't all be a perfect fit around every type of cabling with varying wire and sheath thicknesses.)
     
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  • #13
    MR2DI4 said:
    the only thing I've seen actually work to keep water out is thick butyl rubber tape.
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    How about self vulcanizing tape like https://www.tape-deal.com/nl/tape/vulkaniserende-tape/ - is that another name of butyl rubber?

    These are for sealing / repairing leaking water pipes and claim UV and water resistance, some even specify underwater application. It should chemically fuse together to form one solid layer.

    €9 for name brand and €3 for generic, not very expensive. This one states 15 kV/layer waterproofing application in the specs, https://www.bison.net/nl-nl/producten/bison-rubber-seal-direct-repair-tape-blister
     
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  • #16
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  • #17
    stevenkan said:
    Oh, I guess these are essentially the same thing. I thought vulcanization required heat.
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    Technically, it does have to be at a temperature higher than 0 Kelvin.

    More seriously, it's a chemical process, but the temperature needed would just depend on the exact materials involved. Sulfur vulcanization of natural rubber like in tires requires it to be heated with sulfur and lead oxide, but other materials could vulcanize at lower temperatures. If they occurred in nature together and the process could happen at ambient temperatures, we probably wouldn't even think of the resulting material as being vulcanized because it would happen naturally rather than being an industrial process. We'd just find whitewalls hanging from trees and think how awesome it is that nature provides us with such a useful item.
     
    MR2DI4

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  • #19
    stevenkan said:
    How about this self-fusing silicone tape stuff? I have a few rolls in my network junk box.
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    Try it out. It may work for your application. I've always been a little wary around stuff containg silicone because they seem to require a really clean surface for best results.

    I searched around a little bit and found this video that the presenter applies a 3M Temflex 2155 rubber tape in a similar manner to how I've done it in the past. If ease of re-entry is a concern there is always a "buddy wrap" method where you wrap a housing or connector with a layer of 33/88 tape with the adhesive facing out. Since butyl wrapping a wire consists of going a ways past any connector or housing this can help to make re-entry easier with a minimal effect on moisture protection.
     
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  • #20
    I can't believe no one hasn't already....

    kcKmW6.gif
     
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  • #22
    MR2DI4 said:
    If ease of re-entry is a concern there is always a "buddy wrap" method where you wrap a housing or connector with a layer of 33/88 tape with the adhesive facing out.
    Click to expand...
    May as well just use some other kind of tape for that, or plastic wrap, and not deal with that horrible gooey rubber electrical tape adhesive at all. I assume the point is just to prevent the butyl rubber from making contact with the housing/connector over most of the surface, creating a shell, and just the ends would be sealed with direct contact where it extends past the housing/connector. (Of course, that's what the housing is supposed to do in the first place, with the cable inside.)
     
    stevenkan

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  • #24
    . . . and this time it was the keystone jacks.

    I wired up one of my rental units last week, and 4 of the runs just had inexplicable failures. My Pockethernet reported opens, shorts, and miswires that could not have possibly been correct, given the results I was seeing from testing in both directions.

    I was suspecting that maybe my handyman had done some horrible splices above the ceiling without telling me, and actually considered re-pulling the two runs that reported a failure 2m inside my wall, but he had left enough extra on one side that I was able to actually pull at least 3m through, reterminate, and then find that the "failure" had moved to some other location on the cable.

    I clipped off, threw away, and replaced 6 of these blue keystones before I threw up my hands and terminated the cables with RJ45 plugs, just as a sanity check. All the runs now tested flawlessly.

    I replaced all the blue keystones with white keystones from another brand, and all runs tested flawlessly.

    I should have kept the bad keystones so I could cut them open and inspect the insides, but I was hot, sweaty, tired, and pissed off, so I just chucked them in the trash and drove away.

    These have almost 5 stars on amazon, and I used 10 of them from the same box successfully in another unit a month ago. I would have suspected my termination technique, except that all my white keystones worked flawlessly the first time, and every blue one that failed this week was successfully replaced by a white one, with the same person terminating.
     
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  • #26
    stevenkan said:
    . . . and this time it was the keystone jacks.
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    Reviewers are often too easy to trust crap. The 1* reviews indicate high failure rate and fake advertising, like not actually suitable for 6A cables and too flimsey to cut through thicker conductors.

    I standardized on Digitus for cabling, patching and keystoning stuff and all their products have a Declaration of Conformance and often a test cert, like https://ftp.assmann.com/pub/DN-/DN-93603___4016032259398/DN-93603_certificate_mul_GHMT Channel Link_20190822.pdf?nodl=1

    Works on AWG 26-22 too so it handles pretty much any cable I ever bought, from cheap 5e to 6a.


    There are more premium brands like Draka but it's a bit too €€€ for me.

    Find a good brand and stick to it, is my advice. There is too much random shit on Amazon.
     
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  • #30
    stevenkan said:
    Yup. I know that now. 😂

    It's just that I'd never even heard of a keystone jack failing before. It seems like such a simple thing that would be impossible to screw up.
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    Actually I'll amend that a bit. I have dealt with keystones that popped out of the receptacle, and keystone jacks that were too wide to fit side-by-side in a patch panel.

    But I've never had an electrical problem with a keystone jack until now.
     
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  • #31
    FWIW, my decidedly low-end contribution to weird networking issues is: I had some unmanaged switches (yeah, I know) in my house, that would mysteriously stop working, on seemingly random and changing ports, at seemingly random times. Replacing the whole switch with another of the same previously-working model did not resolve the issue. Turns out the UPS was failing. When it finally started beeping, I replaced the UPS with a surge protector and the switches behaved again, as if nothing had ever been wrong. Made me nervous about the UPS and power issues in general, though, so I never put the UPS back in (again, low-end).
     
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  • #32
    CatBus said:
    FWIW, my decidedly low-end contribution to weird networking issues is: I had some unmanaged switches (yeah, I know) in my house, that would mysteriously stop working, on seemingly random and changing ports, at seemingly random times. Replacing the whole switch with another of the same previously-working model did not resolve the issue. Turns out the UPS was failing. When it finally started beeping, I replaced the UPS with a surge protector and the switches behaved again, as if nothing had ever been wrong. Made me nervous about the UPS and power issues in general, though, so I never put the UPS back in (again, low-end).
    Click to expand...

    The company I worked for way back when had a small catholic college as a client.

    Weird shit was common unless you used at least a decent power strip.

    They were on the edge of a power grid was the explanation I got.

    But I witnessed the weird shit first hand many times.
     
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