As I’m searching for a good 24-port router with VLAN and IGMP support, I asked a colleague for his preferred choice and he warmly recommended the CRS328-24P-4S+RM. So I ordered one and I have to say I am very impressed with the feature set. Very nice device at an interesting price point, congratulations Mikrotik!
However, I’m very surprised about its idle power consumption. I’ve measured it at 25W idle power consumption (!) when nothing – absolutely nothing – is connected to it. I’ve tried to disable every port’s PoE support, and I’ve even disabled all ports altogether, but it still consumes the same amount This is on RouterOS 6.42.5, which is not the most recent release, but nothing in the release notes hint at an improvement in this area in more recent releases.
We’re talking about a private home environment here, so what may be acceptable in a business environment is a no-go for me. I mean, come on, 25W? That’s 3x the idle power consumption of a modern PC. That device alone grabs a whopping 10% of my whole house’s power consumption
Are there some other settings I could try to tweak?
Is there a way to disable PoE altogether for a quick test to see whether that is to blame?
Anything else I could try to get the device down to reasonable power draw?
Does the CRS326-24G-2S+RM consume less in idle? How much does that model need? (Yeah I know it doesn’t do PoE, but it might be an alternative for me nevertheless.)
Here is my CRS328-24P-4S+RM
This is running;
3 data only ports
3 48v ports running 2 UniFi AC Pro’s and a PoE splitter for modem.
3 24v ports Running 2 UniFi CCTV cameras and an NSM5
3 SFP’s
I didn’t think consumption was too bad to be fair bearing in mind I also run a Hex as a main router as well where the CRS328 could probably do WAN as well.
28.4 W as in your screenshot sounds reasonable considering the active connections on your device. However, I guess that’s just the PoE power consumption as 26.3 V * 0.4 A + 52.5 V * 0.3 A = 26.27 W, which is close to the Power Consumption value shown in System Health. That excludes system power, though.
In my case, the 25 W are measured on the wall plug with a dedicated Kill A Watt known to be quite accurate, a Brennenstuhl PM 231 E. Interestingly, the CPU idles all the time at 2-3% but its temperature rises from 20 C (ambient temp) to 40-42 C until the fans kick in – which I think is really strange on a fully idle modern ARM-based device. Today I’ve upgraded RouterOS + firmware to 6.44.1 and reset the configuration, just to ensure everything is right and there’s no config issue. Still the same high idle power consumption though
I have been testing the 8 port CRS112-8P-4S-IN and its power characteristics with a P4400 Kill-A-Watt meter. Firmware 6.43.13 was installed. Using the included 28V 3.4A power adapter.
Power draw
4 watts, when powered on, nothing plugged into ports, the idle state.
5 watts, when one PC plugged into an ethernet port.
Thanks for your responses. Seeing that there are Mikrotik devices with reasonable idle power draw, I returned the CRS328-24P-4S+RM for a refund and got a CRS326-24G-2S+RM instead. That one is at 7.8W in idle, which I consider ok for the things it can do – that’s still measured without any devices connected to it, but a big and very important improvement for me nevertheless.
CRS328 isn’t any more inefficient than CRS326, it has to do with power supplies.
CRS328’s power supply is designed to push up to 500W over POE and at idle its running at 5% load. At that load, efficiency for just about any power supply is gonna be terrible (it’s good if it gets to about 50% efficient).
CRS326 on the other hand is running off of a standard Mikrotik 20W wall wart that at half load is getting over 90% efficient.
Additionally, yes it’s ARM but not mobile ARM and so it lacks pretty much any power gating features found in mobile chips. And on that note, I still don’t know of any desktop PC (running desktop-class chips) thats idling under 10W
This is on RouterOS 6.42.5, which is not the most recent release, but nothing in the release notes hint at an improvement in this area in more recent releases.
