Indeed I did, but a wall socket can be made available if needed. One is plugged into an extension board at the moment, purely for temporary convenience.

I have to say though in my own mind that having ones with pass through power is more convenient. The downside is that they seem to be relatively expensive, and considerably larger.

When I used them I did use the pass through ones because the inconveniences you mention for m were overridden by the ability to plug an extension into it and not use a main socket just for the powerline - most houses don't have enough sockets to be able to do that. But, if it is only temporary and you can free up a socket to use then I agree it isn't worth the expense to buy the pass through plugs.

Do not use the extension socket unless you want issues in future. I would have personally just changed their wireless card as it seemed to be faulty (assuming other wireless devices had no issues). I know a few which have been running for 100+ days without a dropout on my media server.

Edited by ukhardy07 (Mon 04-Apr-16 11:33:35)

In reply to a post by cheshire_man:

... However I read that PLAs must/should (not sure which) be connected direct to a wall socket...

I have run several of these in various locations via standard but fairly short extension leads without any issues whatsoever. Surge protected and other fancy extensions are a different matter though.

To update this.

In the end I bought for them 2 pairs of BT Powerline 600 units with pass-through power. I set them up at home to check them and get them all talking to each other. I also checked they would work across different power rings protected by MCBs (I think that's what they are in our house)

Then last night took them over to install them. Given that the temporary 2 PLA units had been working without a hitch for a month or two I was reasonably comfortable with it all.

I plugged the two units by their PCs into wall sockets and their extensions into the pass-through power sockets. When I came to plug the one in by the router I hit a problem. They have wall mounted shelves floor to ceiling and end to end in their lounge. One is just above the socket line so it was not possible to plug the PLA into the wall socket, and no other PLA accessible wall socket was anywhere near the router. So I used a non-protected extension board and plugged the PLA into that.

Connected the PCs and routers and switched it all on. Everything worked straight away, no problems. As they have power-saving I did wonder whether they would successfully "wake up" this morning, but emails this morning have assured me all is well.

While I'm well aware that PLAs can cause problems in some situations - RFI - they do seem to be a reasonable solution where cable runs are unacceptable or not realistic.