Turning a router (BT Smart Hub 2) off or not?

JustAnotherSaver

Ok so with the price of everything going up I'm looking to see where we can save some money & just seeing what's worthwhile or not.

Leaving the microwave on just to display the clock is one. Not sure what it uses. 

Read about routers this week & was surprised at some of the figures being thrown around for various routers. I'd not even thought of it, so I decided to contact BT to see what the Smart Hub 2 uses, with view to turning it off when we're at work. I was going to say at night but that's probably only going to be a 5-7 hour window. When we're out of the house at work will be an 11 hour window. So the question was how much it'll use during this time...

According to the UPS supplier, at continuous 12W it should last about 40 minutes and at 6W 75 minutes.

Wi-Fi routers are typically solid state devices and do not have moving parts, as a result their energy consumption is very low and they are usually left on 24 hours a day to provide uninterrupted internet access. We estimate that a Wi-Fi router uses 2 to 20 watts, with 6 watts being average for a wireless router.

I couldn't get anything out of them beyond that. They lost me totally with their opening line talking about 40 minutes & 75 minutes.

To the above I said if you're estimating then are you saying you don't know what the energy consumption is.

The woman just repeated the bit about 6 watts average.

So anyway, for anyone who has a definitive, I'm basically just looking to see if this is a worthwhile practice? Am I talking about saving about 5 pence per year or £50 per year or what?

For the record, my electricity is charged at 28.02p per kWh with Shell Energy.

TadleyBaggie

Constantly turning the router on an off will likely cause connection from the exchange to be marked as unstable and cause issues. Best to leave the router on. 

gefnew

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/6348837/wi-fi-router#latest
Look at this thread.

Benny2020

The BT hub has a software page that you can access and disable or reduce the blue light and switch it on or off at certain times, the same with wifi so instead of switching it off at the mains you can just disable certain features at certain times.

Archie_Duke

I think the 40/75 minute figures are going about because of the switchover to Digital Voice. People who need guaranteed power for an essential phone connection are installing Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS) to achieve this. Effectively a battery backup during a powercut. On these UPS those are the approximate times they can sustain a working Smart Hub 2.

I found this about power consumption on a blog about the issue: Power demand of the Smart Hub 2 as stated in BT instruction leaflet: Idle 0.036W Maximum 14.04W (∴ presumed intended maximum current = 1.17A)

I’ll only link the main page because the detail is extremely geeky https://bt-digital-voice.blogspot.com/

The Energy Efficiency Data Sheet for the BTSH2 is here https://www.bt.com/content/dam/bt/help/sh2-user-guides/BT-Smart-Hub-2-Power-Efficiency-information.pdf

So at ~0.04W at idle (when no devices are using the hub and the load is minimal) I don’t really think it’s worth turning it off either when you’re at work or at night. 

The usage per DAY of 11hrs x 0.04W= 0.00044 kWh/day.

Try some figures yourself, I came up with an annual saving figure of 5p a year. It won’t always be using the true idle power, of course and if you have FTTP there’s the Openreach network terminal using power too.
https://www.rapidtables.com/calc/electric/energy-cost-calculator.html

Archie_Duke

I had a look for my FTTP network terminal data. The Huawei Echolife HG8240 that I have is an average of 7.5W / 12W maximum. The only time it’s been off in 2 1/2 years is during powercuts!

Chino

Archie_Duke said:

I found this about power consumption on a blog about the issue: Power demand of the Smart Hub 2 as stated in BT instruction leaflet: Idle 0.036W Maximum 14.04W (∴ presumed intended maximum current = 1.17A)

The blog poster appears to have misread the leaflet. The power consumption figures stated in the "Let's get started" leaflet for the BT Smart Hub 2 are:

• Off: 0.036 W/s
• Idle: 8.48 W/s
• On: 14.04 W/s

Archie_Duke said:

The Energy Efficiency Data Sheet for the BTSH2 is here https://www.bt.com/content/dam/bt/help/sh2-user-guides/BT-Smart-Hub-2-Power-Efficiency-information.pdf

If you read the data sheet and the line "Power supply unit information", you will see that the data sheet is for the power supply used by the BT Smart Hub 2, not for the Smart Hub 2 itself.

JustAnotherSaver

Archie_Duke said:

I think the 40/75 minute figures are going about because of the switchover to Digital Voice. People who need guaranteed power for an essential phone connection are installing Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS) to achieve this.

I genuinely thought she meant https://www.ups.com/gb/en/Home.page and wondered what was so special about them. lol