Over the last few weeks I have been trying to get organised at home and one thing that is really bugging me is the way that my data is just scattered everywhere.

So I have spent some time rebuilding my home server to run Windows Server 2008 and it now runs really well with about 1TB of available storage. The main purpose of this machine is as a place to backup all data from multiple machines.

My home was built 2 years ago and as such is very energy efficient which is great in the winter but in the hot weather, my home office can get very hot very quickly. Throw in a server with that amount of spinning disks and my office goes from cool and quiet to noisy and hot.

Turning the server off is far from ideal so I have been looking to give it a new home somewhere else in the house. Eventually we found a hidden corner in the dining room where it is out of site and to be fair, this room is not used daily the server will be well out of the way of day to day household traffic.

But the problem came when I needed to network my office to the server. My office is upstairs at one side of the house and the dining room is downstairs in the exact opposite corner. As such, getting more than about 6mbits from a wireless connection is a challenge and a non starter.

Running cable is also not really an option. Sure it would be fast and secure but it would involve me lifting the floor in at least 5 rooms and that would make an awful mess.

So what about PowerLine networking? I have read a lot about this over the years and the reviews of the latest 200mbits kit are positive so £70 later I have everything I need to connect my office to my dining room.

I purchased the ZyXEL PowerLine HomePlug AV PLA400 Twin Pack which comes with 2 adaptors and everything needed to get going.

The instructions seemed far too simple. Plug in each device to a mains plug socket, switch on, use. And you know what? It just worked.

Now I have always been a big fan of stuff that just works and this is one of those products. No configuration, just plug in, switch on, use! Now there were a few warnings such as not to plug it into a surge protected power switch (these just kill the performance) etc but nothing too ominous.

Now I did load up the included software and use it to change the default pass codes on the devices for security but that was the only configurable option on these things.

So how do they perform?

Well I bought this model because it does not come in the form of a power brick that takes up half the wall. It connects to the mains using a standard figure of 8 lead which makes placement easier. The only other connection is an Ethernet cable. In my office the device is plugged into my router and in the dining room it is plugged into the server. Easy!

Now all the reviews and the pre sales documentation does point out that whilst this kit claims 200mbit/s, in the real world due to quality of wiring, distance, interference from household appliances and so on, you will never get close to that number. Indeed so confident are they on this that they only fit the device with a 100mbit/s Ethernet port. And of course Ethernet itself is not 100% efficient so one can expect that 100mbit/s port to run at no more than 70mbits in optimum conditions. So at no point have my expectations been set to expect fibre speed connection.

Now the electrics in my house are brand new (like the house) but it is a large house and the mains is set up in an interesting way. The plug sockets are split into 4 zones. 2 ring mains upstairs (one on the left side of the house and one on the right) and 2 more downstairs (same split again). This means that my signal needs to pass not only over a fair distance but also via the distribution and fuse box (which is in a different corner of the house).

So I don’t think my set up falls into the optimum configuration category but running some large file transfers the real world transfer speed of this setup is 45mbit/s which is over 5 times faster than wireless and more than usable for what I need.

So am I impressed? Too right I am. This kit just works. Period.

And in a smaller house or an older house where the mains distribution isn’t split as much as mine, the performance would be better still. On top of this you can add more adaptors so this system could run over several rooms.

So if you are looking at an alternative to wireless in your home and don’t want to wire your house, this may just work for you.