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The original was posted on /r/homelab by /u/electricscooter_NO on 2026-03-29 00:54:58+00:00.

A question that may be a bit outside the group’s main topic, but few people know networking better than you do, and since this is mostly a networking question and it’s definitely used with my homelab since that’s a brain of my house, I thought I’d give it a try.

I’m working on a smart home setup and I’m in the middle of a full renovation. In version 4 of my smart home, there will be a lot of ESP devices and DIY sensors.

Ideally, I’d like to have as many devices as possible on LAN, and preferably powered by PoE as well, both for stability and reliability in operation. But that results in a lot of cabling.

In each ceiling, I’ll have two ESP devices. I’ve already run cable to one of them since it uses PoE, and right next to it (we’re talking less than 30 cm away) there will be another one. For the second one, I figured I might just have to accept using Wi-Fi, since running two separate cables to two sensors in every ceiling quickly adds up.

These devices don’t use much data traffic, so I was wondering: could I squeeze in something like this up there together with one of them, and then run PoE to both so that both devices get PoE power and both are on LAN?

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007038590328.html

Another concern is that whatever device I use to split one connection into two would have to be as small as possible, because there really isn’t that much space in the ceiling voids.