Saving light with the router at home, is it possible? Find out how to do it

What influences the power consumption of the router

WiFi routers are devices that are permanently on, although in general they consume little energy, it depends on various factors that these devices consume more or less. Below, you can see what consumes the most in a router ordered from highest to lowest:

• Hard drive connected to the USB port of the router: What consumes the most from a WiFi router is if we have a 2.5” hard drive connected to the USB port that it incorporates. Today, the vast majority of routers have a high-performance USB 3.0 port to share files and folders on the local network and the Internet. This 2.5” hard drive with USB power needs power from the router. they generally need about 6W of power to work properly. Although there are 3.5” hard drives that have external power, the most common is to use 2.5” hard drives and powered from the router.
• processor power: the more powerful the processor of the router, the more energy it will require and, therefore, the more consumption we will have. Above all, we will notice an additional consumption if we have the CPU running continuously at 100%, for example, if we are using the router intensively it will consume more energy.
• High performance WiFi networks: internally the router has a dedicated chipset for each WiFi frequency band, if we activate the WiFi connection the consumption of the router will increase, and if we are using the wireless network intensively, it will have additional consumption.

A clear example is the new Movistar Smart WiFi 6 router compared to its predecessor Movistar HGU, the new model consumes more energy than the previous one when we are demanding WiFi or cable bandwidth, we are talking about a difference of 50% more compared to to HGU. The same happens with very high-end routers that incorporate two or three WiFi frequency bands, consumption compared to a mid-range router skyrockets, precisely because all the equipment components have to be powered.

What can I do to reduce consumption?

The first piece of advice that we can give you is that if you are not using the router at night, you can turn it off and thus you will save the energy corresponding to 8 hours of operation (approximately). This will automatically lower the consumption of the router by approximately 30% during the day. You can automate this with smart plugs with a timer and that this scheduler is saved in the plug’s internal memory, because when you turn off the router it will be left without a WiFi connection and will not be able to communicate with the Cloud.

In the event that you need to have the router always on, our recommendation to save energy goes through:

• If you have hard drives connected to the router to share files and folders, unplug it if you don’t use itFor example, at night.
• Enable the “hibernation” functionality of hard drives, so that they automatically hibernate the hard drives if nothing is being read or written. This will save us a lot because it is what consumes the most in a router.
• set the WiFi scheduler to disable WiFi connection at night, and enable it again during the day. You could also do this on demand using the router’s application or through the device’s firmware, but it is much better if this is an automatic process.

As you can see, with three simple gestures, you will be able to reduce the consumption of your router and save, although you must bear in mind that the router is a device that consumes very little, even though it is permanently on. It is like refrigerators, which consume very little, but since they are on 24 hours a day, at the end of the year it is the appliance that consumes the most.