It may sound insane, but for folks that are operating gigabit or multi-gigabit fiber connections (certainly not the standard, but definitely becoming more avail

It may sound insane, but for folks that are operating gigabit or multi-gigabit fiber connections (certainly not the standard, but definitely becoming more available), the amount of CPU needed to route at gigabit+ speed, the switch chips that need juice, the WiFi radios that have 4+ antennae all needing amplification having a baseline power requirement, there's a surprising amount of juice required. If you're running one of those combo cable "modem" + router + WiFi access point jobbies, that's even more radios that need juice. I didn't start getting a reasonable understanding until I started watching ServeTheHome videos, where they usually toss each device on some sort of Kill-a-Watt style meter, and then start putting the device under load to see how it changes.