This topic

Smart Hub 2 Power Consumption

Eco_warrior — Fri, 03 Feb 2023 13:38:44 GMT

We've just had our hub replaced with the Smart Hub 2 just in case it was the cause of broadband drop outs. As with all new electrical devices we get, I checked the power consumption. I was really disappointed to find that it is about 10.8W and doesn't reduce even if 5GHz WiFi is turned off. Our previous Hub 5 had smart power saving and only consumed about 6.5W with just the 2.4GHz enabled.

This is a big backward step when everyone is doing their best to reduce electricity usage, cost & CO2 emissions. 10.8W may not sound a lot but adds up to 92kWhr per year or £32 at current prices. If you multiply this by the number of houses and businesses with hubs in the UK there's probably an entire power station output supplying them. Not happy.

Re: Smart Hub 2 Power Consumption

imjolly — Fri, 03 Feb 2023 14:14:30 GMT

although the recommendation is to leave router(SH2) connected 24/7 you can always turn it off at night and on again next morning as many do but it may eventually affect you connection speed

Re: Smart Hub 2 Power Consumption

gg30340 — Fri, 03 Feb 2023 14:43:16 GMT

The SM2 has different specifications than the HH5 so a straight forward comparison may not be possible.

For example the SM2 as well as being a DSL modem and Router it is also a Dect base station for the Digital Voice phone system. This draws power however it should alleviate the need if you presently have wireless Dect phones for you to have a separate Dect base station using the power that it draws, that is assuming you are going to use Digital Voice.

If you are not going to use the Digital Voice phone service you could always source and use a different router that consumes less power.

Re: Smart Hub 2 Power Consumption

Les-Gibson — Fri, 03 Feb 2023 14:56:42 GMT

You may be able to reduce that 10.8 W a little.

Basic Hub Light Control

Re: Smart Hub 2 Power Consumption

Eco_warrior — Sat, 04 Feb 2023 08:03:46 GMT

Yes, this is good advice and we often do turn it off at night or when away. We've never noticed any reduction in speed as a result. The internet connection has been almost faultless for many years but in the last couple of weeks has intermittently dropped out especially first thing in the morning.

Re: Smart Hub 2 Power Consumption

Eco_warrior — Sun, 05 Feb 2023 14:24:36 GMT

After further experimentation I have discovered that the power consumption can be reduced to 7.1W by disabling all WiFi and using a direct connection to my laptop. Unfortunately this is not a practical solution when so many devices around the home need a WiFi connection.

Re: Smart Hub 2 Power Consumption

gg30340 — Sun, 05 Feb 2023 14:39:22 GMT

Is 11.5 pence per day really such a drain on your finances so that you can use the Internet to connect your Internet connected devices 24/7 if you choose to do so.

Perhaps you should consider doing away with some of your Internet connected devices as they will no doubt be using electricity to either run them or recharge them.

Re: Smart Hub 2 Power Consumption

Eco_warrior — Mon, 06 Feb 2023 06:52:43 GMT

Of course 11.5p per day is not an issue in itself but the typical household electricity bill of £1200 per year is the sum total of lots of tiny contributions so we need to pay attention to all of them. Most of my WiFi connected devices are either off most of the time or take tiny amounts on standby. For example the smart TV takes 0.3W (and still manages to update the programme guide), the smart meter IHD takes 0.8W, my automatic weather station 1.2W and so on. Most devices are required to take less than 1W on standby, so why is there no regulation on what a router or hub takes?

Re: Smart Hub 2 Power Consumption

garybs29 — Mon, 06 Feb 2023 09:28:40 GMT

Sometimes words really do fail me, a device that provides a connection to the internet is completely different from a device that can be on standby & isn't used all the time. There's far bogger issues than a hub contributing to the bill yearly but this isn't the place for them tbh

Re: Smart Hub 2 Power Consumption

Les-Gibson — Mon, 06 Feb 2023 10:14:06 GMT

You can probably save more by doing away with unnecessary gadgets like your weather station and whatever other devices you have that are consuming power for little or no return than you will save by reducing the amount of power your router uses.

Re: Smart Hub 2 Power Consumption

old_email — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 18:44:48 GMT

I'm glad you've clarified the usage. BT's Power Consumption document merely states:

Product Name: BT Smart Hub 2
Power Supply Unit Information
BT Plc, London, E1 8EE, UK . Company number 1800000
In Operation 14.10
Network Standy (sic) 8.48
Off mode 0.04
Elapsed time before going to standby mode 20 mins

So apart from lazy typos they could be talking Horse Power, kW, Joules/hr etc. Smacks of unprofessionalism/AI produced output.

Re: Smart Hub 2 Power Consumption

Eco_warrior — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 08:15:11 GMT

Interesting information, thank you. I have never observed the hub going in to network standby mode. This is possibly because there is always something actively communicating, such as my weather station or smart meter. As there are so many smart devices now I suspect that the hubs rarely go in to standby mode.

I notice that EE are now offering WiFi 7 with reported power consumption of 30W +. If this is correct it is pretty alarming!. Wouldn't it make sense for future hub designs to have the capability of programmable WiFi signal strength so that users could tailor it to their actual requirements.

Re: Smart Hub 2 Power Consumption

naylor2006 — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 09:03:41 GMT

We've come a long way, imagine a house still with 60w bulbs in every room, or even 120watts, imagine a house using 1KW of power just on lighting alone....

No it wouldnt make sense for an ISP to allow for someone to screw around with the WIFI radio strengths, this would cause an additional strain on support and also whilst everyone thunks their radios up to max, because thats what most people will do, this will cause additional interference in built up areas on the very busy 5Ghz band, yes 6Ghz is coming but the point remains the same. ISP's need to send out a fixed hard to break unit, the less settings the better.

So taking that into account, BT/EE make it very easy to use a 3rd party router as there are no obstacles (provided you dont have EETV), you can get your own router and fine one that is super efficient, one that can turn radios off on a schedule perhaps and also one that falls within your eco warrior values.

I dont have the same concerns as you with regards to network power consumption, but what does annoy me is how expensive it is to install solar panels which would solve alot of the wider things we probably do agree on. I looked at solar and it would take us about 10 years to break even on the spend, by which point we may have moved.

Re: Smart Hub 2 Power Consumption

Eco_warrior — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 09:25:04 GMT

I take your points. Adjustable signal strength would make sense for me as I like to fine tune my power saving but as you’ve said, the vast majority would just put it up to max.

I wonder what the theoretical best efficiency of a hub would be. Perhaps we need government standards on hub power consumption to push it in the right direction rather than covering agricultural land with solar panels (that should be on roofs).

We used to think that CFL lamps consuming 13W to achieve the equivalent of 60W of incandescent light was the best that could be done but then LEDs reduced it to about 9W and the latest ultra efficient LEDs to 4W (at a price that’s not currently worth paying).

Re: Smart Hub 2 Power Consumption

Keith_Beddoe — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 09:47:44 GMT

See https://bt-digital-voice.blogspot.com/p/bt-smart-hub-2.html

Re: Smart Hub 2 Power Consumption

naylor2006 — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 10:00:19 GMT

I just think where we can reduce power in some ways, it will go up in others, take a look at graphics cards and PC gaming....my 4080 consumes something like 300watts at full tilt (320 officially), the next set of graphics cards in the 5000 series will consume another 100 ontop of that. An extreme example just to illustrate what im getting at, sometimes performance requires power, sometimes additional features require additional power like a better CPU etc.

My WIFI access points consumes max 9w each (and I do have my radios at max), but then I have 8 of them.....my router draws about 2-3 watts, so say I just had my router and one AP I would still be above the hub you speak of and this is premium gear. To contradict the statement I just made, I dont know what the my AP's are drawing in real time, I dont have monitoring for it so the maximum 9w is from my reading actually more like 6w in general use, given what other people have monitored on more fancy POE switches. The radio strength has less of an effect on power consumption that actual use of that access point.

Cant say the government need to focus on routers when it comes to eco considerations, there are far more things that require focus, a router pulling a few more watts I would hope should be way down their list of worries when NVIDIA are asking people to buy 1000w power supplies just to run their new generation of cards.

Doesnt stop you as an individual making your own efforts to reduce your footprint or other similarly minded by researching and finding the most eco friendly router.