I re-did all the panel connections, but we still ended up with one bad line with interior-grade cabling traversing the exterior of the house just high/far enough that I didn’t want to attempt replace it, and it seems to cause drop-outs for all devices on the network).

Installation of the Devolo could not have been simpler, taking about three minutes and working first time without issue; so far the connection has been completely stable.

But what about speed?  I did a quick test, copying a folder containing about 1Gigabyte of files from a local drive on the PC to a NAS drive across the network. Here’s the contents of the folder:

Here’s the result over the Devolo “1200 Mbps” connection (which translates in theory to 143MB/s!):

Average speed over the Devolo Powerline 1200+ around 8MB/s (or 67 Mbps).

And here’s the results over the (unreliable) ethernet connection:

Average speed around 11MB/s (or 92Mbps), that’s 37.5% faster.

I then tried further tests using Totusoft’s free “LAN Speed Test (Lite)” from http://totusoft.com/downloads/

Here’s the Devolo:

and here’s the Ethernet:

The results are similarly in favour of the ethernet connection. 32% faster write speed, and 14% faster read speed.

I’m a bit disappointed.

However, I did get this result a number of times with the ethernet connection – “Error reading test file” - illustrating how unreliable it has been:

Our greatest concern is stability rather than raw speed, as family members have all been going nuts with the drop-outs – I had managed to prove that whenever the line to the study failed, other devices in the house would suddenly lose their WiFi and/or ethernet and/or internet connection, for reasons I don’t fully understand. So let’s see over time whether the Powerline solution turns about to be more stable. After two hours the answer is seeming to be “yes”!

Sam and Steve have removed the troublesome chimney… which on the ground floor has changed this:

to this (also note the hatch through to the kitchen):

and has opened up a hole from the top to the bottom of the house; here looking up from the first floor into Helen’s room at the top:

In the kitchen, they have removed the old pantry wall, moved the doorway, and made the hatch through to the dining room:

and after I removed the old range…

…

…

…they have opened up the chimney breast ready for the cooker (well almost):

In Helen’s room at the top, they have started opening up the roof space which will extend the room, finding a rather massive wasps’ nest:

And in the top front room (our bedroom probably) they have put in the Velux and much of the stud work for the small shower room/loo:

Meanwhile, we are now harvesting the potatoes from the front veg patch, and they are absolutely delicious.

The garden is currently rather more habitable than the house.