Power consumption of poe switches?

Networking & Firewalls
1

Howdy all! I’m in the market of buying a used POE layer 3 switch, however, before buying something off of ebay, I wanted to know if the power consumption of these devices is substantially higher than their non-POE counterparts even when they have the same devices plugged into them? I’m running this at home and in my bedroom so don’t want to get something that uses a ton of power since I don’t really need it considering the only two poe devices I have at home are my two APs and they currently run off of injectors.

Thanks in advance!

2

You can look up the details on the manufactures site, but I feel certain they will use much more power than the injectors.

3

:cry:

Thanks. In that case, it looks like I’ll be searching for a non-POE model instead then. Thanks again!

4

You probably don’t want a big enterprise 24- or 48-port POE switch with dual PSU’s etc… in your bedroom. Honestly, for only 2 devices that are already running on injectors, a POE switch is probably overkill.
I’m currently using a Netgear “smart managed” POE switch (GS-110TP - 8 powered ports, 46W POE budget) to run POE cameras and a Raspberry pi. Cannot speak for power consumption though I could hook my kill-a-watt up to it. One nice thing about this switch is that there’s an (unsupported) management CLI in addition to web management. FWIW, the smaller Netgear POE switches are fanless, so they’re hopefully not wasting a ton of extra power.
Keep in mind that all POE has resistive losses in the Ethernet cable. I read somewhere that the losses are worse for passive POE at lower voltages - in case you’re using passive injectors.

5

Power losses are always worse at lower voltages, because the amount of power wasted is affected by the amount of current through a line - this is true for all power cables not just POE. Higher voltage means lower current for the same power draw, and lower current means less power wasted.

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6

Yeah, the main reason why I was looking into a larger poe switch was to try\test out new features and configurations. If that comes at the cost of a lot of power consumption, I’m gonna pass on it…

7

Just an update to this, I was able to get hold of an awesome HP 48 port POE+ switch to try out and home and confirmed that the thing used about 60 watts when powering two POE APs. Due to the high cost of electricity where I live, I ended up buying a Zyxel GS-1200HP which is an 8 port smart switch with 4 POE+ ports (much smaller and fanless). Powering the same exact devices it seems to use about 20w so in less than a year, the thing will pay for itself. Overall happy with the thing and glad I now have the ability to Poe devices if needed.

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