There is a big push by regulating authorities around the world to drop the standby power consumption of technology devices. The Australian Government has its own “1-watt Initiative” where it expects all new technology products that use standby power will not exceed one-watt by 2012.

However, based on our own recent testing, one product range that will escape that limit is the humble ADSL router. According to Point Topic, there were 281million broadband subscribers worldwide at the end of 2006.

Even if you took a conservative estimate that there was one ADSL router/modem for every 10 broadband users, that’s still plenty of routers in use.

The problem with ADSL routers is that they have no standby mode – as soon as they’re connected to the phone line, they’re up and away, consuming full power because of the permanent connection they have to your internet service provider. If you have more than one computer connected to a router, power consumption rises slightly by approximately 300mW per connection but with the average ASDL modem/router consuming between 8-10-watts of energy every hour every day, it adds up.

At 10-watts, you’re looking at 240-watt-hours per day or 87.6kWh per year per router. Multiply that by 20million ADSL routers and you’re talking about 1.752million megawatt-hours a year. That’s the equivalent of powering 3.3million 60-watt light globes all year round.

But if users simply switched off their routers for the average eight hours they slept each night, we’d save a third of that power consumption or around 600,000 megawatt-hours worldwide every year.

And switching off the router causing no problems – it will still work perfectly when you switch it on in the morning.

As it is, routers used in the typical family home are simply burning up electricity for no reason during the night, maintaining a broadband connection that no-one is using.

It’s time more ADSL router manufacturers began building in sensing technology so that if it doesn’t see an outgoing signal from any PC on the router, it shuts down into a power-down mode.

If we’re all being asked to make energy savings, it’d be worthwhile saving energy in areas we don’t need to use it so we can save it for things we do want to use it on.

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