How much electricity does a WiFi router consume?

My Netgear R6350 wifi access point running OpenWrt 21.02.03 and 5 GHz only uses ~4.5 W in casual use, and goes up to ~6.8 W when I run iperf3 full tilt through it.

Measured using a watt-o-meter like this: http://seacourse.dk/wiki/tiki-index.php?page=Home+Electricit...

They can be borrowed in libraries in Denmark, same as books.

> I could not find any related and trustable calculation about how much electricity consumes a Wifi router.

On the botton of your router you probably have a sticker about required power supply. Which should tell you about the router max power consumption.

Very basic wifi routers usually requires 12V 1A, which gives 12W (12 * 1). Typical expected power consumption should be around 25% of this - 6W.

This gives you 4,32kWh / month.

The lowest power WIFI router I've seen was requiring 12V 0,5A, and the most powerful - 12V 3,5A.

> I am curious about the difference between the idle mode and when I downloading with full bandwith.

You need to measure it with watt meter. There are too many factors to just guess it.

Full download via WIFI may not be the most power hungry feature of a router.

You can measure it yourself. Wattmeters are cheap, i'm running two of them right now. The laptop im writing from is consuming around 20 watts[1].

Generally i would think most heat-generating appliances (microwave, stove, hot water) are the elephant in the room, energy-wise.

[1] https://pomf2.lain.la/f/e2s025vl.jpeg

Trying to reduce power draw from small appliances like a Wifi router doesn't make any sense. Turn on your oven to bake a pie for half an hour (30min at 2kW), that's 10 days of your router's energy consumption.

If you exclude heating, the main culprits for home electricity usages are : kitchen appliances (stove / oven / microwave / dishwhasher), washing machine, dryer.

A quick and dirty method is to read the voltage and current on the DC adapter. That will give you an idea of the upper limit. For example, an old D-Link router I have has a 5V, 1A DC adapter. So the maximum power the device will use is 5W (P =V * I). Really, there is also usually a 30% to 50% safety margin, so it's probably more like 3W in this case.

Probably depends on what your wifi router is made of and how you are applying the electricity to consume it. I'd imagine a lot.

Around 10W I'd say. So assuming your router is on 24 hours a day, you're looking at 10*24=240Wh, which is 0.24kWh.

With the electricity price in the EU maybe reaching EUR 0.2/kWh, you're talking EUR 0.04 a day. Even if the electricity price doubled to EUR 0.4/kWh you would be looking at EUR 0.08 a day.

A wifi router is not likely going to make a huge difference in your electricity budget. If you want to make a dent the most cost efficient ways are typically replacing lighting with LEDs, and improving the insulation of your house. Heating and cooling typically consumes 30% of your electricity budget.

After that I would take a look at your refrigerator and water heater.

My Unifi U6 APs draws 4.2W from the PoE switch as of writing this (light traffic, but 5-10 IoT devices connected). I'd guess add 10% PSU inefficiency and 10% margin for error, and you're looking at 5W.

A full router obviously draws more, but it depends on your internet connection: Our old DOCSIS3 router (AVM Fritzbox, full router mode+wifi) ran quite hot and is known to have thermal issues. The new place has some shitty DSL (32MBit/s effective speed), and the router I use (older Telekom Speedport in PPoE modem mode) barely gets warm. Didn't measure, but I suppose something like 15-20W vs 5W.

I can only echo the other recommendations: Get a kill-a-watt/powermeter/energiekostenmessgerät. BUT be careful, they are often not very accurate in the low ranges, and don't confuse apparent power and effective power (I know I usually do). You also want one that can show the total energy consumed over a given time frame, e.g. for your fridge or freezer or dryer.

You can also use smart sockets, since some of these have a powermeter as well (same caveats regarding low consumption apply; also these draw another 0.75W). Just make sure to configure fridge/freezer sockets to be always-on to avoid nasty surprises. That's what I'm doing. Since I'm not a fan of cloud-based solutions mine run Tasmota and feed the data into Home Assistant.

Oh, and: Especially if you have an older dryer (non-heat-pump), measure that or outright get a new one. Our heat-pump dryer payed for itself after 3-4 years (comparing advertised consumption pre-buying and the old dryers measured consumption; even if it takes 5-8 years imho it's still worth it). And it can be controlled via WiFi, so theoretically we can sync it with our (planned) photovoltaic installation.

I was interested in that some time ago, as I host a datacenter^H^H^H^H^H^H the upper shelf of a cupboard is the place where I self-host.

I bought a wattmeter and plugged it between the UPS and the power socket. In addition to the UPS there is a 7 years old tower computer ("the main server" - without a GPU but without any optimisation either, and a few disks including platter ones), a PoE 8 ports switch, a RPi and a ER-4 Ubiquity router.

I was really surprised that the draw is a consistent 60 W. This is about 100 € per year in France.

I recommend getting a plug in energy meter. You can get an accurate reading for any device with it.

I'm currently using mine to figure out why were still using 500W at 2 in the morning.

I picked up a power / energy meter a couple of years ago, when we put on solar panels, and spent a good couple of weeks putting it inline to various appliances to identify peak draw or 24h draw (depending on the type of appliance).

They're about AUD$30, and highly informative devices - excellent for answering this kind of question.

About 10 Watts or 7-8 kWh per month, give or take.

If you have electric heating, you need heating, you have a thermostat, and the router is located reasonably close to where you need the warmth, it will cost you nothing. If all these conditions are met, the same electricity is producing routing and heating and nothing is wasted.

I use Mi WiFi Range Extender AC1200 (on AP mode), which consumes 0.3 A (the label only list the ampere instead of watt). I live on 220V AC country, so:

- 220V * 0.3A = 66W

- google "how many hour in a month" = 730 hours

- 66 W / 1000 W * 730 hours = 48.18 kWh / month

I am a bit skeptical about the power that this router use, should be just using around 7W instead of 66W, I am thinking of buying a power meter to get the real power usage. and will change my router if this router really consumes too much electricity

10-15W for a wifi router with a cable modem, less if it's only wifi, but that's the general ballpark (this is measured with a calibrated smart-plug)

It vary quite a bit. I have seen them go from 6w (ubnt aplifi hd) to 24w (A asus router, forgot the specific model) in idle.

A cursory google for "wifi router kWh" comes up with 7.3kwh in a month, from energysage.com. Does that suit?

You should probably not simply take the values on the box. Just like a computer, routers also have idling/high processing periods that affect power needs drastically. It's a good idea to take some smart plugs (like TP-Link's HS110, also supported by Home Assistant) to make these measurements.

I was curious about this as well when I purchased a UPS that shows the wattage used in real time. I connected only my cable modem and 1st Gen Google WiFi router to the UPS and it registered as between 1 and 2 watts. So, it seems like it's a fairly small amount.

Rule of thumb: if it gets hot it burns power. More hot, more power.

Be more judicious with electric kettles, immersion heaters, electric ovens, lower washing machine temps, outside air drying over electric dryer, LED bulbs.

The other factors are too small to worry about.

Well that depends on how big your area is and even if your router is set to eco mode.

I suggest, if you have an appartment, by reducing the signal strength first, which will consume less power.

But in the end of the day, you will need to measure it.

If the power usage is correct on my UPS, my whole setup draws about 70W for: - USG Pro 4 - Cloud Key gen 2 - Two basic POE Switches - 4 access point - 5 cameras - 1 raspberry pi - 1 VSDL Modem

> and people should save as much kWh as possible.

What really matters is cutting peak hour consumption, not total kwh. At least around here during night-time electricity is almost free compared to peak hours

My router uses 8 Watt from the mains, regardless of how much traffic it's handling. It also has an ECO mode that doesn't actually lower the power consumption.

Heating, using electricity to heat anything is a mild environmental crime. For rest of the thing, all appliances are efficient enough and still improving.

It wouldn't take much, pretty sure any mainline AC voltage direct to a router would consume it in a fraction of a second. Hope this helps :)

Anything with a wall wart will have negligible current draw. You're way better off focusing on appliances and heating/cooling.

Tri-band LTE router with WiFi 2.4 only takes 4W, under speedtest 6W. Enabling WiFi 5GHz adds extra 1W.

"Prices of the electricity in the EU recently became sky high"

I will nominate for Nobel Prize of Economics politicians that voted for the mapping of electricity on the most expensive source (now gaz).

This is an EU reform trying to make an electricity market.