Should I turn off my Sky router when on holiday?

TUVOK

Sky have said a few times to me to leave my router plugged in and on whilst on holiday.
So will this cause any problems on my return?
Or is it safer and cause no problems on my return to turn off and unplug?

Neil_Jones

It'll be fine, routers are intended to be left on 24/7.

IvanOpinion

I leave mine on to give me access to my heating controller, security cameras, doorbell etc. It also allows me to remote access my PC, which has come in useful several times.

Assuming you have no smart appliances, if you are on full fibre it doesn't really make much of a difference, might save a few pence in electricity draw per day. If you are on older ADSL, turning the router off might affect the monitoring of your line making the provider think it is faulty, which may result in slower speeds. I have also heard an argument that says turning it off reduces security risks, but I do not know why that would be the case.

TUVOK

Thank you both for your replies.
I have always left my router on whilst on holidays etc, I think That I will carry on doing this.

fatbelly

I've always left mine on.

However, there have been two occasions over the years where I came back from holiday to find the electricity had tripped off while I was away.

Restarting the router was the least of my problems...

km1500

on the other hand, and since this is a money saving site, you would save about 1kwH over 7 days by turning it off (about 25p)

PHK

km1500 said:

on the other hand, and since this is a money saving site, you would save about 1kwH over 7 days by turning it off (about 25p)

But when you turn it back on it needs to reconnect to the network (with all that entails) which temporarily uses more power (because of high processor activity) than if it had been set there. 

TUVOK

I am going to leave it on.

Many thanks for all replies, as always so helpful to a non teckie member.

DullGreyGuy

It will make little difference either way. Our router uses about 5.6p of electricity a day, if thats going to make a major difference to your finances you probably shouldn't be going on holiday. 

We leave it on because we have smart devices at home which we still interact with when away (eg CCTV) but also software updates still come through whilst on holiday so they can apply themselves whilst we're away. In principle ISPs monitor lines and test them over night and being offline may be incorrectly identified as a problem - though this is a bigger issue for those that switch it off every night than those that do it just for holidays.