Turn off Virgin Router to save electricity?

SnakePlissken

Swipe said:

SnakePlissken said:

Coffeekup said:

I can't go into money savings, as I hear it's miniscule, unless the current price quadruples.
But I been running mine off every night almost for 7 months, no noticeable difference.

Looking back I had more issues years ago when it was plugged in all the time... You'd call up and they would say "unplug it for 30 seconds and it'll be fine" which it was. I used to tell friends and family the same unplug it to re-sync it. 

Years ago they were called old wives tales...
Anyway what's the worst that could happen? You'd be without the internet for 2 days and they'd send you a new router.

Ideally a modern router should be restarted weekly, just like tvs and computers.

My BT Home Hub auto-reboots fortnightly (and no way to turn it off) and always at the most inconvenient time

Yes some routers will reboot themselves, when they detect memory registers need refreshed.

What_time_is_it

This thread reminds me of the ways our office is encouraged to switch off a light or recycle some paper or some other tiny little change, but nothing is ever done about the 23 degrees heating turned on 24/7, the flights taken to UK meetings, etc that could actually make a difference.

Saving the planet one tiny step at a time while ignoring that massive boot trampling all over it.

EssexHebridean

SnakePlissken said:

nelliedeen said:

I did start turning the router off when I was not using the internet but I have been switched to fibre phone so my router needs to be on all the time anyway so my phone will work.

I never noticed a reduction in my electricity usage anyway.

Yes if you have been moved to an ip phone, then you should leave your router on, apart from a weekly restart. Though if its a virgin one in modem mode then will not need a weekly reboot. But your wifi router will.

This also applies if in the case of needing to make am emergency call overnight you would be reliant on a mobile phone where you might need wifi-calling to give enough stability for a call to be made. 

Qyburn

Mstty said:

SnakePlissken said:

Ideally a modern router should be restarted weekly, just like tvs and computers.

Why? What is the benefit of this?

Shouldn't be needed for decent equipment.  If it's not decent then there's no saying that weekly intervals make any sense, it can get screwed up in a lot less, or last a whole lot longer.  If it's flakey low-end kit then it may need to be power cycled now and again but it would make more sense to do so when it's needed.

The downside is that startup is one of the biggest loads, and the most likely time for stuff to fail.

SnakePlissken

Qyburn said:

Mstty said:

SnakePlissken said:

Ideally a modern router should be restarted weekly, just like tvs and computers.

Why? What is the benefit of this?

Shouldn't be needed for decent equipment.  If it's not decent then there's no saying that weekly intervals make any sense, it can get screwed up in a lot less, or last a whole lot longer.  If it's flakey low-end kit then it may need to be power cycled now and again but it would make more sense to do so when it's needed.

The downside is that startup is one of the biggest loads, and the most likely time for stuff to fail.

We restart our kit on wider estate regularly, endpoints are given 2 weeks before compulsory reboot is initiated on them.
Swiches also have a cycle for restarts, not weekly though. But they have redundent swicthes to take up slack in any failures

For startup failure that is more servers with raid arrays, with a server having been on for months potentially seeing a drive(s) fail and raid falling over. But as servers are mostly virtual on hyper V /hybrid cloud now, not so much an issue now.

At home i haver had start up failure on any of my nas boxes or switches.
Only time anything barfed was when there was a powercut when toaster fuse blew , caused a trip on earth leakage.

And TV, phone  or orbi router never fails with regular restarts. 

Qyburn

SnakePlissken said:

We restart our kit on wider estate regularly, endpoints are given 2 weeks before compulsory reboot is initiated on them.
Swiches also have a cycle for restarts, not weekly though. But they have redundent swicthes to take up slack in any failures

That's interesting, was that based on experience and what sort of kit is that?  Professionally I work mainly with Cisco and none of our customers have any sort of regular reboot of their routers, gateways, firewalls or switches.

Regarding failure on startup I agree that servers and storage are more prone, during a planned power outage recently the customer lost his Synology NAS (not a brand I'm a great fan of) but I've known a VPN concentrator to die after a power cut and a few other bits and pieces.

At home I use Mikrotik and that generally goes four to six months between restarts which would only be for service work like software upgrades. Aside from power cuts of course.

wild666

When I first got BB the line was so old that instead of 32Mb that it said I would get the speed dropped to 2Mb. I had a load of issues with BT, the last thing they wanted to do was replace the line from the pole to the house until I emailed the CEO and told him that the line from the pole was the problem and if it wasn't replaced I would cancel the DD. They replaced the line from the pole within a week and it's being fine ever since. 
I agree that for most people turning off the router when not in use could cause problems with the speeds. I have never turned the router off unless I wanted to restart the connection which for a while was constant as the router did updates and the second PC wouldn't connect using wi-fi.

Spoonie_Turtle

wild666 said:

When I first got BB the line was so old that instead of 32Mb that it said I would get the speed dropped to 2Mb. 

[Off topic but those lines are still in place in our village - our choice of internet is via those (<2Mbps) or, since 2017, fibre to the property with one other provider.  No shopping around for the best deal here!]

SnakePlissken

Qyburn said:

SnakePlissken said:

We restart our kit on wider estate regularly, endpoints are given 2 weeks before compulsory reboot is initiated on them.
Swiches also have a cycle for restarts, not weekly though. But they have redundent swicthes to take up slack in any failures

That's interesting, was that based on experience and what sort of kit is that?  Professionally I work mainly with Cisco and none of our customers have any sort of regular reboot of their routers, gateways, firewalls or switches.

Regarding failure on startup I agree that servers and storage are more prone, during a planned power outage recently the customer lost his Synology NAS (not a brand I'm a great fan of) but I've known a VPN concentrator to die after a power cut and a few other bits and pieces.

At home I use Mikrotik and that generally goes four to six months between restarts which would only be for service work like software upgrades. Aside from power cuts of course.

Reboots on network side  are more probably done as part of the cve security patching, on the kit, which is  mostly cisco, but im not directly  involved with network side of things. But using redundent switches means 1 can be patched and unpatched switch made the redundent one  also makes it  easy to rollback if any  issues on live switch.

 CVE  patching is ever more regular than in the past. Mainly due to the world we live in now, for us its not worth chancing it as risks are too high.


MY android  TVs do have regular weekly restart if left on, as apps, tv guide and sound have issues otherwise. Unplugging main tv is too much hassle as sound bar synch goes if both switched off and then takes ages to fix. So generally left on standby and restarted weekly.

I use netgear switches at home.

Synology are also picky on what drives can be used, put me off buying any.

I use WD nas and found these to be ok. But as 1 is raid array,  it does need to be treated more carefully. But is on a scheduled on/off every day rather than being left on. To save electricity as it does use a bit for the size of it.

Lose a raid once and it teaches you to do regular backups to an external drive. Spending a week to recover data using data forensic tools  is not much fun.

cm4ever

Funnily enough I've just ditched Virginmedia for BT Fibre Broadband (FTTP).

I always had to have the Virgin router in 'modem mode' so I could use my own router with their service, as my router runs the house network. Now with the BT service, my router plugs directly into the fibre ONT modem - giving me approximately a 10w constant saving no longer having the 'extra' router in circuit, it was the older SuperHub2. The BT ONT modem power usage is miniscule in comparison.

Yes it's just a small but constant power saving - every little helps