Router Left On, Will It Damage?

Quentin

Have you reported this to them,?

Having a faulty piece of electronic equipment isn't necessarily because you bought cheap,!!

strangeotron

talk talk aren't interested

as if the routers they give free to new customers will be of any real quality

JJ_Egan

strangeotron wrote: »

Leaving it one doesn't seem to be working.

Every other day, roughly, the connection seems to just drop and I have to switch it off and on again to resolve it.

Cheap rubbish router obviously

Could be a bad connection at the router at the master socket or any cables in-between .
If you think its a rubbish router buy a better one yourself .
Netgear Nighthawk neither cheap nor rubbish .

trigger_fish

strangeotron wrote: »

No contradiction at all. The issue is about whether having it running will overheat or wear out the hardware in some fashion, not whether having it plugged in would specifically cause a problem

Apart from burning he house down (extremely unlikely) if the router fails ou ring them up and ask for a replacement.

Neil_Jones

strangeotron wrote: »

Leaving it one doesn't seem to be working.

Every other day, roughly, the connection seems to just drop and I have to switch it off and on again to resolve it.

Cheap rubbish router obviously

Almost always sign of a faulty router or one that's going to die soon. My fibre setup is the old style of a router and a BT Openreach modem which at current prices I can get the router for £20 and a cheap DSL router for £15 and its far superior than any all-in-one solution I've ever seen on Fibre. ADSL routers on the other hand, having had modems built into them all along, tend to be relatively stable across the board.

Nilrem

As a general rule turning solid state electronics on and off frequently is typically far worse for them than leaving them on (thermal expansion and contraction causes cumulative damage which can cause solder joints to fail, as does heating/cooling come of the individual parts).

If the internet connection is playing up (and you've checked with a wired device that it's not the wifi) it's typically going to be a faulty router, faulty household wiring, or a problem with the line into the house or the ISP.
If it's happening more in the damp/cold then it's most likely a problem with the external cabling as things like poor or damaged insulation allows water in, or the cold weather can cause the copper to shrink slightly meaning a a broken conductor goes from working (because the break is held together) to not working as the edges of the break pull away from each other.

oldagetraveller

Just about the same can be said for a lot of other things too. e.g an incandecent lamp filament will last much longer if the lamp was left on rather than the sudden heat cycles caused by on/off, a car engine which has done 100000 miles of motorway speed driving will probably be in better condition than one which has only done 10000 miles of daily school/shopping runs (assuming correct maintenance)etc..
Some weeks ago I was having fibre broadband speed problems. The first thing that the attending BTOR engineer asked was "do you leave your router permanently on?" Yes, I do because as already mentioned the exchange equipment will "think" there is a line fault which doesn't exist and reduce the speeds to compensate.