why, oh why, do they have to make routers black, and leave nearly no ventholes?

[VirtualLarry]

I have a DIR-615 C1, that I flashed with DD-WRT, and am using as a wireless repeater. It's placed in a window in a garage. Unfortunately, the sun hits it in the morning, and it heats up until it's unusable. I went and touched the back LAN ports, they were too hot to hold my finger to. Well, the heat cannot be just the sun though, because I unplugged it and it got a tiny bit cooler.

I stuffed some paper towels between the router and the window as a "heat shield", don't know how that's going to work.

 

[Binky]

Asus RT-N16 is white with lots of vent holes.

Whwy would you put a router in the sun?

 

[somethingsketchy]

Binky beated me to the question...

Well, the heat cannot be just the sun though, because I unplugged it and it got a tiny bit cooler.

Just because you unplugged it, doesn't necessarily mean it'll cool down...plastic still holds in heat for a while. Overheated laptops don't cool down immediately, even if you shut it off. To solve the heating issue, you may have to either get some external cooling (i.e. a small desk fan) or move the router away from the window, so the sun isn't beating directly on it

 

[heymrdj]

Those routers normally have 12v power bricks that are bigger than the router's actual needs. I mod their tops and mount on 40-80mm fans normally. Then they were fine for in sun high amp usage.

Oh and ram sinks work really well when applied to their radios/chipsets. Makes the fan work much better. The best mod I did for a high amp project was to take a dell slim tower chassis fan (the turbines) and mount that funneled air channel into the side of the router with heatsinks faced the appropriate directions on the heatsinks. The downside is at full blast those turbines need about 2.5A of 12v, so another power source had to be used.

 

[VirtualLarry]

or move the router away from the window, so the sun isn't beating directly on it

I had the router about a foot inside the window originally, but I didn't get signal from the primary router that I was repeating.

 

[somethingsketchy]

If the antennae were replaceable, I would see about getting some hi-gain WiFi antennae. Perhaps that'll get the signal through the drywall/wall material without placing the router into direct sunlight

 

[shortylickens]

Because a fashionable product sells better than a practical one.
See Also: Apple.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I had to reboot the router today, later in the day when the router wasn't hot. Could it have been damaged by the heat?

 

[Tsavo]

I've got a WHR-HP-G300N that runs very cool.