Missing important feature: ECO MODE / Power Saving

Feature Requests
1

OpenWRT is so great however it still missing one important feature,
Could you please release new firmware update that support ECO MODE / Power Saving feature.

That feature will help reduce the energy consumption of the device which is beneficial for both the environment and utility bills. I think that's important nowadays.

Thank you so much :slight_smile:

2

How much energy does your router use?

Genuine question - not a flippant response.

I ask because you can only use less energy if you make your device less performant, which might not be what you want or need.

3 Likes
3

My two cents:

  • Not all devices have power sources that will reduce power consumption reduce their power usage. In many cases, this feature will have no effect at all.
  • OpenWrt (and Linux in general) already try to consume as little CPU (one of the big power users) as possible. I do not think there is much to do here. Besides, many CPUs cannot reduce their frequency.
  • You could also reduce power consumption if you reduce the wifi usage or power (another big power user). You can already do that, but it has consequences on the usability of the device.

In conclusion, if you have a real problem (like "my device is using X watts of power in this situation, but it could use only Y watts if we do this or that"), then let's talk about it. But these broad requests do not go too far, usually.

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4

According to this link:

  • Ten watts is a safe average electricity consumption to assume for modern Wi-Fi routers from top manufacturers. (For which I'm guessing Wifi would contribute at worse 1W). That would mean 7.2kW per month (720 hours at 10Watts/h)

So if in December i consumed 720kW in total for a cost of 72$, the router should have counted for 0.72$, if i'm not wrong. Not even en espresso shot basically. Sure, adding more such devices it starts to add up, but for a single home-router it's acceptable, there are other much bigger offenders in the house (keeping hot water, cooking, fridge etc)

5

7.2kWh.
Not 720kWh.

6

No, no, its my monthly average household consumption 720kW total, not per hour

1 Like
7

Must have a NG power plant at the side of your shack.

8

the h at the end was a typo, lol

9

This varies widely between devices, you can observe anything from around 5 watts up to almost 30 watts here. The WLAN cards are a major contributor to that. For 802.11ax the AP capable M.2 cards of both vendors specify 3A at 3.3V (and they do generate heat accordingly, heat sink and some convection required), which comes out at 10 watts max. per card (and they do use that). The onboard WLAN chipsets on your typical plastic router aren't that different from that (quite a few high-end wifi6 routers, especially the early ones, need active cooling - all of them need a much better thermal design than their predecessors). Some devices have more dynamic power consumption figures (so lower when idling) than others.

It is not possible to give a general answer to this question - nor would an 'eco mode' be anything but a placebo approach. If you are keen on this topic, you need to dive into it and do your benchmarks, power measurements (with semi-decent equipment) and define your trade-offs, while being aware that these figures might come out quite differently on other device models, even with the same SOC underneath.

1 Like
10

can confirm... most of the time such feature are really just marketing material/placebo.

With my experience with devices, modern ones have mostly very simple power design (as it was notice that most of the time having complex power design cost more money and saving on that cause instability...) and the most consuming part is wifi and ethernet port (for 2.5 and 10g on copper)

Now also add the fact that as the power design is most of the time broken, thing is actually disabled so only the clock is scaled (and that save really 0.1w, just save on temp)

And the ethernet port most of the time have problem with EEE with the feature present but actually disabled for stability reason. Sooo most of the time such ECO mode is actually a toggle and doesn't actually cause power save. They probably operate on wifi by limiting the chan width or the power emission at the cost of lower range and worse perf.

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