I understand that there is a difference between sleep mode and actually cutting the electricity. However, most if not every router I’ve ever handled has had a physical electricity cut switch… or so I’m led to believe? Please bring me clarity!
In: Engineering
Wow, you must have nice routers. None of mine have a power button. They have a “reboot” button, which doesn’t do that but does reset some stuff. Only removing their power input cord actually powers them off.
Many consumer routers don’t (or at least didn’t used to) have a power reset switch. Disconnecting a cable would be the only power cycling mechanism that didn’t involve shutting off an entire breaker or power strip.
Tech support do not trust random users to know how to turn a piece of kit off and on, but pulling a power lead is unambiguous.
It’s common when giving tech support to ask someone to “unplug, wait, and then plug back in”. This is because many people toggle the wrong switch or do something unexpected. Asking to unplug, wait, and then plug back in is a shortcut instruction to dummy proof and make sure the device gets all the way turned off and then back on for a reset.
Coming from a person that kept telling people to pull the plug on the router I can answer a bit.
There is always a way to transform energy from the wall socket into something usable, like from 230V AC to 12V DC.
This is usually done by a) a transformer ( no longer used ) and b) a step-down converter.
Now the issue with the step down converter is that it uses a dedicated pwm controller ( a processor ) that needs a sort of well regulated voltage to work. However as the wall adapter housing the step-down converter is all inside the “brick” it gets hot, and as it gets hot the capacitors that are used to regulate the Voltage for itself and for your appliance decrease in capacity and the Voltage starts oscillating to much, causing either a) the pwm controller to go haywire, or b) making your router’s processor behave unexpectedly.
As an example, a typical oscillation with a good capacitor might be something like +/- 0.02V, but with a bad capacitor it might go to 0.25 or more, and this causes weird things to happen.
By powering down the wall brick, all of the power inside the processors go to Zero allowing them to start relatively fresh, even thou later it might repeat as the capacitors and other components get hot.
Note that capacitors also go bad as they age regardless of temperature ( temperature accelerates this process ), and there are also “bad” capacitors on the market.
Memory circuits maintain their state when they have power. When you remove power, they will drift to their default state. This allows anything that was set wrong to be reset to the correct state.
Because it’s cheaper to make them without a switch and routers tend to stay on for months or years without being turned off.
Very often it is not clear just from looking at the device whether the button that says “Power” is actually performing a physical electricity cut or not. Usually it’s not. So unless you know for sure that it does, it’s best to be on the safe side and just unplug.
In addition to what others have said, waiting a minute before plugging it in allows any capacitors to discharge. Juts turning it off and immediately back on risks some part of the circuit staying energised and not rebooting properly, because a charged capacitor can maintain some voltage for a while.
The question ask why not flick the wall switch. You lot misread it. I too want to know. Why physically pull the plug?
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