Is it a good idea to turn off the router at night, or does it have more drawbacks than benefits? More and more elements of our house are connected to the Internet: telephone, television, vacuum cleaner, light bulbs... You will be interested in knowing what it means to leave your house without connection for several hours a day.
Turning off the router every night has advantages and disadvantages. The reason that leads you to do it may be different in each case: you may have considered it for health reasons, you may want to do it to save money... But is it worth it? Do the disadvantages or the benefits outweigh?
The vacuum cleaner, the speakers, the light bulbs, the television, the alarm clock... There are so many connected devices that obviously you should think carefully before turning off the router. Keep in mind that, for better or for worse, you will leave your entire house without connection for many hours a day.
When to turn off the router?
There are times when we must turn off the device. Or at least reboot. For example, if there is a connection problem and we want to solve it in the most basic way possible: we turn off, disconnect, turn on again after a few minutes. But we also turn it off if we want to change the IP, for example, since this is the best way.
In what other cases? If you are going to spend weeks or months away from home, you can turn it off. But it depends. Because if you have video surveillance systems connected via the Internet or you access the cameras or you access fire or water warnings, it doesn't make sense. Turning it off can prevent hacking while you're not there, but you should weigh it in your specific case and depending on the type of devices you have connected and the use you are going to give them.
And if I want to save?
If what you want is not to have devices on at night to avoid the famous phantom consumption and save on the electricity bill every month, you may have considered turning off the router at night. From the Naturgy help website, the electricity and gas marketer, they explain that there is no fixed consumption for the router and it depends on the company with which you have contracted Internet. But you can make an approximate calculation of what you consume.
The consumption of a router is between 5 and 10 W, so an approximate consumption per day would be, rounding up to the maximum, of 240 W. If you turn it off at night it would be seven or eight hours. In other words, we would save 80 W per day or, what is the same, 2.4 Kw per month according to Naturgy's calculations. It will depend on the price of electricity and each moment, but we would save about 79 cents per month if we turn off the router at night. Less than ten euros a year.
Worth? It depends on each one. There are many other devices that consume more than the router and that you could turn off (or use a smart plug) and that also affect the so-called phantom consumption. Appliances that you are not using but continue to consume while they are in sleep mode. In the case of the router, consumption is minimal and allows us to have all the devices connected in homes that are increasingly intelligent.
Problems turning it off
Homes are becoming smarter and have more “smart” options and turning off the router at night does not allow these functions to continue working. If your video surveillance camera is connected to WiFi, for example, or your baby monitor camera. The same happens if you have home automation control from your mobile phone: you will need the Internet to turn on the lights, to raise the blinds, to make the alarm clock sound...
But also, not only at the level of use it is uncomfortable. It is also on a technical level. The updates or reviews of these devices are usually done overnight and, if we turn it off, we run the risk that they will not be completed.
To this we must add the evidence that this practice reduces its useful life. You would be permanently powering off and on a device that is meant to run for weeks or months without you unplugging it. This will only make it work worse.
We must admit that it is annoying and inconvenient to have to start the day by turning on the router if practically everything around us is connected. But it is also that, as you can read in the previous paragraphs, disconnecting it has hardly any benefits, to which is added that keeping it plugged in has few harms.
Yes you should restart it
Now that we are clear that turning off the router at night is not something that is highly recommended because we will not save anything and we will lose the constant connection that dozens of connected home devices need, it is time to address another important issue.
In this case, we are talking about rebooting the router on a regular basis. You don't need to do it every night, but restarting once a week would be nice. In addition, it is a process that cannot be done in any way, being necessary to wait about 30 seconds after turning it off before connecting it to the current again.
