Why do you bother with these overpriced routers?

[moeller0]

@dlakelan

99.997% of a routers time is idle.

Citation needed ;). I agree that the majority of time will be spent idling, but this are a lot of 9s.

@dlakelan

The J4125 processor of the machine I linked above has a thermal design power of 10W,

TDP is a measurement to select/pick the cooling solution for a CPU, it does neither reflect the max. power draw of a CPU (albeit longterm the power draw should converge on this) nor the average power draw of the full system. Intel and AMB both started slightly re-defining these numbers some years ago, so these are even less easy to interpret. That said, they are still somewhat predictive, however with quite a margin of uncertainty.

@dlakelan

In reality, it'll be idle as a router, and the whole thing will probably use 3-5W out of the box.

I would love to see longer term wall plug energy/average power measurements. Not because I do not believe you, but because I think it would be nice to document this somewhere. In case you have measured data maybe post it over in the "energy/power" thread:

Power consumption of routers and associated networking equipment [collection]

This thread is intended to collect information about power consumption by OpenWrt routers as well as associated network equipment. Depending on the measurement devices available anything from immediate power (Watt) to energy (Joule or Watt Second) is fair game. NOTE: This post should be editable by all, please feel free to add your own numbers to the table To make a start (? denotes "missing"/not measured values): type ; device ; energy/h; min_power; max_power…