How Many Watts Does a WiFi Router Use?
The humble WiFi router is a rarely considered source of energy use. But, for most households, it runs all day, every day, and that can quickly add up. If you’re trying to understand how to reduce your energy bill in small ways or find the right power source for your WiFi router, figuring out your router’s wattage requirements is a critical first step.
Below, learn how many watts a WiFi router consumes on average, how much this costs homeowners, and how to calculate the exact energy usage of your WiFi router at home.
How Many Watts Are Consumed by a WiFi Router?
WiFi routers aren’t close to the energy consumption of demanding appliances like air conditioning units or washing machines. However, it’s still helpful to know how much electricity your router uses to reduce whole home energy consumption or find the right power source.
WiFi routers vary in their power consumption. On average, a standard home router uses about 5 to 20 watts — less than your laptop or smartphone, but it can still add up over time if left running continuously. Most routers run non-stop for 24 hours daily, so keep that in mind.
Ten watts is a WiFi router’s average energy consumption for models from top-performing manufacturers. At this level of power usage, you can keep a WiFi router charged with a small and compact EcoFlow RIVER 2 Series portable power station, such as the EcoFlow RIVER 2, great for powering personal devices like a router, or the powerful EcoFlow RIVER 2 Pro, which can power 80% of appliances.
Modern high-performance routers, or those with extra features like mesh networking, could consume more, especially considering the size of the network it’s covering.
Remember, this amount is just the energy the router needs to run and doesn’t account for the wattage that might spike when numerous devices request data, often due to streaming or online gaming.
Other important energy measurements to be aware of are the amps and volts the WiFi router uses to run. Most routers use around two amps and run on a standard 120-volt outlet, pulling between 5 and 7 volts of energy.
While these numbers might mean little to you initially, they’re essential to calculating the exact wattage requirements for your WiFi router or converting one measurement to another.