Posted: Sun Oct 10, 2021 9:48 Post subject: Router Power Consumption
For sometime now, I have wanted to minimize the power consumption of my Always-On gadgets. My routers are Always-On, so naturally I also want to know about their power consumption, and possibly find ways to minimize this power consumption.
During my (re)search, about Power Consumption of my Routers, I came across this gadget Power Consumption Database site:
http://www.tpcdb.com/list.php?type=11
So one approach could be to buy a model that, out-of-the-box uses very little power. But such models are typically also quite low performance devices, and with sizes of Ram and Flash Ram that often leaves something to be desired.
So a balance must be found, between Power Consumption and Performance and Firmware options.
Has the current world-wide rise in energy prices caught your attention?
Is Power Consumption of your Always-On gadgets something that you ever think about?
Did it occur to you that your gadgets convert most of the electrical power you put into them into heat? So if they are inside your house, then if you bend over backwards to buy lower-power devices to save money on electricity then your heating bills rise.
We bought a new furnace for our house back in 1996. It has gone through an impeller pump replacement and a blower motor replacement. They had to special order the impeller and it took 2 weeks to arrive because it was so old Carrier only had them in their deepest darkest warehouse somewhere. The tech who did the pump replacement was almost annoyed it was still alive. He said "I've never seen a 90% efficient furnace last 25 years espically one without a stainless steel heat exchanger"
I pointed to my server cabinet sitting next to the furnace and said "theres 5,000 BTU of waste heat coming out of that cabinet that the furnace doesen't have to produce. Tell me, what do you think the yearly runtime of this furnace really is?"
He got it. And maybe one of these days most of the greenies out there on a rampage against "power wasting electronic devices" will also.
Joined: 04 Aug 2018 Posts: 1447 Location: Appalachian mountains, USA
Posted: Mon Oct 18, 2021 17:39 Post subject:
Your devices are a source of "electric resistance heating." It's not a heat pump. Not a great way to heat your house efficiencywise. And all that discussion is for winter. What about summer, when waste heat has to be pumped outside? (Or maybe you can tell from that comment that I don't live in the frozen north.) _________________ 2x Netgear XR500 and 3x Linksys WRT1900ACSv2 on 53544: VLANs, VAPs, NAS, station mode, OpenVPN client (AirVPN), wireguard server (AirVPN port forward) and clients (AzireVPN, AirVPN, private), 3 DNSCrypt providers via VPN.
Joined: 08 May 2018 Posts: 14217 Location: Texas, USA
Posted: Mon Oct 18, 2021 18:43 Post subject:
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Your devices are a source of "electric resistance heating." It's not a heat pump. Not a great way to heat your house efficiencywise. And all that discussion is for winter. What about summer, when waste heat has to be pumped outside? (Or maybe you can tell from that comment that I don't live in the frozen north.)
The example was highly simplified to get across the point that there's more to energy saving calculations than just how much power a device uses.
In this case the devices aren't heaters. They are "inadvertant heaters" but I'm getting other work (that brings money in the door BTW) out of them.
I follow the same practices Google does in their data centers, of course on a much smaller scale. I use the door from the basement to the outside and the door from the house to the basement to regulate temp. I also run a floor fan that blows air on the front of the server cabinet.
During the fall and spring simple outside air ventilation is enough to remove the extra waste heat. During a few months in the winter the ventilation is shut off and the furnace runs maybe about 1-2 months. During the summer the AC runs constantly maybe about 1-2 months. I allow the temp to run around 80F in the basement in the summer, the central AC is fed to the house living quarters upstairs and the door to the basement is closed, and the basement door is open.
The only difference from me and Google is I have to manually open doors, turn on and off ventilation fans, etc. Google's datacenters do the same thing automatically.
Naturally of course for the OP with just a small device the heat is miniscule. But then again so is the power usage. The OP was operating off "principles" not practicality and while that is perfectly fine, it ignores practical considerations that affect the realized energy savings.
And of course, the other - major - practical consideration is the cost of a replacement furnace which is not inconsequential these days.
I find it amusing to overturn people's assumptions, which is kind of the entire point of the dd-wrt project, you know? Linksys assumed they could "obsolete" the WRT54G what, about a decade ago? Yet here we are...
I bought a bunch of energy monitoring smart switches a few months ago. I have four already re-flashed and in operation but I have four more to flash (ESPHome).
Never even occurred to me until now to put one on the router (EA8500). They are not only useful for monitoring energy usage, but also useful for forceful power down resets (as is the one on my Home Assistant RPi4). I will certainly put one of these on my router now, as this thread has my curiosity. My guess would be the power draw would be pretty even with most routers, with low or high usage, but we shall see. _________________ Linksys EA8500 (Internet Gateway, AP/VAP) - DD-WRT r53562
Features in use: WDS-AP, Multiple VLANs, Samba, WireGuard, Entware: mqtt, mlocate
Wireless 5ghz only
Netgear R7800 (WDS-AP, WAP, VAP) - DD-WRT r55779
Features in use: multiple VLANs over single trunk port
Linksys EA8500 WDS Station x2 - DD-WRT r55799
Netgear R6400v2 WAP, VAP 2.4ghz only w/VLANs over single trunk port. DD-WRT r55779
OSes: Fedora 38, 9 RPis (2,3,4,5), 20 ESP8266s: Straight from Amiga to Linux in '94, never having owned a Windows PC.
I bought a bunch of energy monitoring smart switches a few months ago. I have four already re-flashed and in operation but I have four more to flash (ESPHome).
Never even occurred to me until now to put one on the router (EA8500). They are not only useful for monitoring energy usage, but also useful for forceful power down resets (as is the one on my Home Assistant RPi4). I will certainly put one of these on my router now, as this thread has my curiosity. My guess would be the power draw would be pretty even with most routers, with low or high usage, but we shall see.
I already used my sonoff POW2 and Tuya energy plug integrated into Homeassistant for measuring energy usage of my always-on gadgets. Which ESP32 devices you are using and which firmware you flashed on esp32 esphome or tamsota? _________________ Upgraded to
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Joined: 24 Oct 2008 Posts: 1079 Location: Latin America
Posted: Tue Oct 26, 2021 21:55 Post subject:
You can use an smart plug and even an app for monitoring the energy consuption.
Or if don't have one of those, you can use a voltmeter/ammeter and sample the average and peak consuption, and do some math.
IMG_20191028_130921.jpg
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This gadget can me modified to have plugs at the input and the output.
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I bought a bunch of energy monitoring smart switches a few months ago. I have four already re-flashed and in operation but I have four more to flash (ESPHome).
Never even occurred to me until now to put one on the router (EA8500). They are not only useful for monitoring energy usage, but also useful for forceful power down resets (as is the one on my Home Assistant RPi4). I will certainly put one of these on my router now, as this thread has my curiosity. My guess would be the power draw would be pretty even with most routers, with low or high usage, but we shall see.
I already used my sonoff POW2 and Tuya energy plug integrated into Homeassistant for measuring energy usage of my always-on gadgets. Which ESP32 devices you are using and which firmware you flashed on esp32 esphome or tamsota?
I got a great deal on some ESP8266s so I bought a dozen of them. I have been using those for my HA home built projects (garage door openers, door and windows sensors, etc). Interestingly enough, the smart plugs I bought also have ESP8266s within. I flash most using ESPHome now. I also used Arduino for a few of the others in the past. I have not had much luck with tamsota. _________________ Linksys EA8500 (Internet Gateway, AP/VAP) - DD-WRT r53562
Features in use: WDS-AP, Multiple VLANs, Samba, WireGuard, Entware: mqtt, mlocate
Wireless 5ghz only
Netgear R7800 (WDS-AP, WAP, VAP) - DD-WRT r55779
Features in use: multiple VLANs over single trunk port
Linksys EA8500 WDS Station x2 - DD-WRT r55799
Netgear R6400v2 WAP, VAP 2.4ghz only w/VLANs over single trunk port. DD-WRT r55779
OSes: Fedora 38, 9 RPis (2,3,4,5), 20 ESP8266s: Straight from Amiga to Linux in '94, never having owned a Windows PC.