Battery backup for a Wi-Fi router: the smallest unit that keeps the internet on, with the hours worked out

The router is the appliance an outage takes first and the one people miss most, and it is also the easiest to back up, because it draws almost nothing. A router’s power adapter is rated about 30 W, so a 288 Wh unit is a working day and a 1 kWh unit is a long weekend, and any of the five picks switches to battery fast enough that the router never reboots. The runtime table above is the arithmetic at the adapter rating; real draw is lower, so the hours are a floor.

Size it from the adapter, then add the modem

Routers do not print a wattage. The power adapter does: Netgear’s Nighthawk RAX50 ships with a 12 V, 2.5 A supply, which is the 30 W the table uses, and the watt-hours guide has the amps-times-volts conversion for yours. A rating is a ceiling. A router idling with a few devices attached draws a third to a half of it, which is why an 8-hour table figure is often a 16-hour night. The modem is a second adapter with its own label, usually another 12 V supply, and a fiber terminal or a mesh satellite is a third. Add the labels, or tick the router in the sizing calculator and add the rest as your own rows.

The switchover is the specification that matters

A router that loses power for a quarter of a second reboots, and a reboot is a minute of no internet plus whatever the modem does next. So the number that decides this purchase is not capacity, it is the UPS switchover time, and four of the five picks state 10 ms or better, the fifth 20 ms. Both are inside what a typical router supply’s capacitors ride through, per the pass-through and UPS guide, and the way to use any of them is the same: the unit stays plugged into the wall, the router and modem plug into the unit, and the battery only works when the grid does not.

That standing arrangement has a cost the spec sheet prints in small type: standby draw. Bluetti states 4.5 W for the Elite 30 V2, which is about 3 kWh a month left in UPS mode, a small standing cost that is the price of never having to think about it.

When the router is not the only thing on the list

At 30 W the router is a rounding error next to a refrigerator, which is why the two 1 kWh picks are here: about 870 to 900 Wh usable covers a router for days or a router and the refrigerator overnight, and the refrigerator page ranks that job on its own terms. Above that, the essentials list on the 3-day plan puts phones, router and a lamp at about 600 Wh a day together, a figure that any pick here covers for a night and the 1 kWh units for three. The other small load in the house, the garage door opener, is the opposite case: about 4 Wh a cycle but a motor start that rules the 288 Wh units out, per the garage door page.

What we left out

DJI’s Power 1000 V2 and Jackery’s Explorer 500 v2 are both buyable and well reviewed and both sit as honorable mentions, because neither maker’s page could be read on the check date and this site prints nothing it cannot source. Bluetti’s AC70 and EcoFlow’s RIVER 3 base model were unavailable at Amazon. No maker in the lineup states a UL 2743 listing for a portable power pack; Anker’s C1000 is the one that states standards by number, and the certification guide explains what each covers.