Should the router be turned off once a day? I calculated the electricity bill, and after counting the cost of power outage by counting the meter, I no longer have to worry about it.

My mother-in-law came to my house for a week and left me a note before leaving.: The light on the router flashes on and off. Remember to turn it off at night, as it wastes electricity. I couldn't laugh or cry while holding the note, but I couldn't explain to her, "The electricity bill for this thing a year is not enough to buy two kilograms of ribs." Later, when I chatted in the group, I found that there are quite a few people struggling with this matter - some people turn it off every day before going to bed, some people come back from a business trip for half a month to unplug the power supply, and some people believe it when they hear that "routers need to rest regularly." I simply break this matter down and calculate it clearly. The electricity bill is accounted for in one account, and the cost of power outage is accounted for in one account. Once the calculation is done, I won’t be entangled.

Calculate the electricity bill first: 24 yuan a year can’t save a breakfast

I have tested several machines at home using metering sockets, and the numbers are not large. The main model, the AX3000T, has 5 watts of no load and about 8 watts of full load. The so-called full load is when a room full of equipment is running speed tests, and it cannot be used for daily household purposes. A optical modem is about the same, about 6 watts. Two units plus one, the larger one is 14 watts, running 24 hours a day:

14 watts × 24 hours × 365 days ÷ 1000 = 122 kWh. According to my household electricity bill, it is 55 cents per unit, which is 67 yuan a year.

Even if you turn it off for 12 hours a day, you will save 61 kilowatt hours of electricity and 33 yuan a year. That's all. My mother-in-law thought that the router was an electric appliance, but in fact it is one of the most energy-saving appliances in the house - the refrigerator consumes hundreds of kilowatt-hours of electricity a year, and the set-top box has 15 watts in standby mode, which consumes more electricity than the router in standby mode. My mother’s house also bought a smart socket for the router to cut off the power on a scheduled basis. After using it for a year, I calculated the cost for her, and she turned off the timer herself, saying, “It’s not enough to save this money.”

Therefore, from a financial perspective, the answer to the question "Should I turn it off every day?" is clear.: Not worth it . The money saved by shutting down once a day is calculated as 10 cents a day, which is only about 30 yuan a year, but the price you pay is more expensive than this. Look down.

Turning it off once a day is just torturing it.

「The concept that the machine needs to rest is basically wrong when it comes to routers. There is no hard drive, no fan, and no mechanical wear parts in the router. The difference in loss between its chip running for a day and running for a year is so small that it can be ignored. It is powered all year round, and the real enemy is not "tiredness" but heat - I used a temperature measuring gun to measure this for three days and wrote an article Router gets hot According to the article, there is only one placement difference between 41 degrees and 52 degrees, which has little to do with whether it is turned on or not.

Instead, he was imprisoned once a day to punish him. What electronic equipment fears most is not continuous power supply, but temperature cycling.: The solder joints on the motherboard expand and contract over and over again when the computer is turned on and cooled off. This is how welding joints develop over time. Why do light bulbs always burn out the moment the light is turned on? It's not a coincidence. It's the moment when the cold wire is energized that has the greatest impact. The same goes for a router. If it is powered on and off once a day, more than 300 impacts a year will cause more damage than if it is running steadily.

There is also a layer of hidden loss: Every time it is powered on, it needs to load the complete configuration back from the flash memory, WiFi needs to be rebuilt, and dialing needs to be restarted. These flash memory writing and rebuilding actions are nothing once, but the number of writes to the flash memory has a lifespan. Adding one more time every day is simply a waste of quota. My old router that has lasted for 8 years ( When should you retire? Read this article ), it was always on all the time. It was finally retired because the specifications couldn’t keep up, so it wasn’t bad.

The chain reaction of a power outage is longer than you think

This is the most overlooked part. What you close at night is not "a box", but the whole family's network. I held a stopwatch and counted. From the moment the router was powered on until it was able to connect to WiFi, I had to complete six things in one go. The fastest was just over one minute, and the slowest was two minutes. For these two minutes, the whole family was disconnected from the Internet.

The real trouble lies behind. Home routers do not have a small battery in their belly to keep the motherboard timed, and the system time will return to zero once the power is cut off. When the time returned to zero, everything seemed fine, and all the scheduled tasks followed - there was a power outage for maintenance downstairs at my friend's house, and his machine was set to restart at 4 a.m., but later it was scheduled to be restarted at 12 noon. It happened to happen that he was having a video conference at home, and the whole family was disconnected from the Internet for more than a minute. I'm here for this Router restarts regularly I wrote about it in that article. If you turn off the router to save power, but end up messing up the scheduled disconnection and parental control functions, you are simply digging a hole for yourself.

There are so many smart devices in your home that you need to consider them carefully. I now have more than 30 smart devices installed, including light bulbs, switches, cameras, sweepers, and door sensors. As soon as the router is powered off and then powered back on, these thirty or so devices will collectively reconnect within a minute or two, driving the router's CPU to high levels. During those few minutes, light bulb commands are delayed, camera push notifications are late, and the sweeper is offline. The more devices there are, the more obvious this "restart storm" is. Some people say, "I don't have that many devices at home." Then this problem is indeed minor, but the pitfall of time zero cannot be avoided.

My mother's native method: Restart regularly and the machine will take care of itself

Does the router never need to be touched? Neither. If the machine is not restarted for a long time, dirty things such as memory fragments and connection table residues will accumulate, which will manifest itself as network speed slowly slowing down and latency increasing occasionally. What I do at home is let the router figure it out on its own.: Start a scheduled restart in the background, set it to four o'clock in the morning on Thursday, restart once a week, and no one in the whole family will notice.

Pay attention to distinguish two things: Scheduled restart means that the entire machine is powered off and restarted. Scheduled network disconnection only turns off the wireless broadcast and the machine itself is still alive. The latter is used when children play with mobile phones in the middle of the night. The article about scheduled network disconnection That's what it's about. Keeping the machine healthy uses the former. Once a week is enough, restarting it every day is purely over-maintenance.

There is a prerequisite for this move: The problem that the router's time resets to zero when it is powered off cannot be circumvented by a scheduled restart. You have to let the router set the time back from the NTP server after it is connected to the Internet. Now, mainstream firmware will automatically set the time by default, so you don't need to set anything. Just don't manually cut off the power and make the time adjustment too frequent.

Under what circumstances should you really unplug the power supply?: Only a few times a year

I’ve said so much “don’t shut it down”, but when it’s time to unplug it, let’s talk about it:

First, it was a night when the thunderstorm was particularly severe. It is true that Jiaxuan uses optical fiber. Thunder coming through the wire can really burn the power adapter. The AX6 at my colleague's house was like this. After a thunderstorm, the router's power supply died, but the machine was fine. In places where there are many thunderstorms, it is safe to unplug the router just like the TV, only a few times a year.

Second, long-term outings, such as business trips for two or three weeks or traveling. Unplugging the power at this time is not to save electricity - if you calculate, if the 5-watt machine is stopped for two weeks, it will save one and a half kilowatt-hours of electricity, which is less than a dollar. The picture shows that during a power outage, you are not afraid of power surges, accelerated aging, and prevent IoT gadgets such as cameras from malfunctioning when no one is home. Come back and plug it in, and the entire network will be restored in two minutes. The time will return on its own. Apart from maybe taking a look at the scheduled tasks, there is no other aftermath.

Third, the machine is already sick - it freezes, all lights are on but the entire network is disconnected, and I can't enter the backend no matter what. At this time, unplugging the power for ten seconds and then plugging it back in is a troubleshooting action and has nothing to do with "maintenance". For the sequence and other tricks, you can read my previous article. How long does it take to be able to access the Internet after restarting? , and talked about the six things that happened after the power was turned on.

Responding to a high-frequency question by the way: If the router is placed beside the bed and left on all night, should we worry about radiation? I used a tester to measure it, and the conclusion is that the radiation level of the router is far behind that of microwave ovens and hair dryers. If you really want to be concerned, it is more practical to move the phone that is being charged by the bedside first. I want to see the data This actual test . Don't turn off the router for "radiation protection", the reason is not valid.

Take your seat: A table gives answers

Fold the above accounts into a table. Just match your family’s situation.:

Give an order at the end: First stop the habit of "turning off every day", then go into the background and find a scheduled restart, set it at three or four in the morning, once a week ； If you have a lot of equipment at home, don't rush to shout "stuck" in the first two minutes after restarting, wait until the reconnection storm has passed. When you are away from home for a long time or during thunderstorms, just unplug it when necessary. Don’t spend any other thoughts on this machine - it costs you dozens of dollars a year in electricity bills and carries the network for the whole family. It is the most cost-effective appliance in the home. Don’t bother with it anymore.