I bought a Orbi 970 system with two satellites in mid-February. Had it hooked up to a 5-Gig symmetric internet service.
Didn't have any issues for weeks as I only put a few devices on it while others sat connected to my older routers that were subnetting from the Orbi 970. As I slowly started moving devices over to the Orbi 970 network, random reboots started occuring.
I've followed all the thread here, Reddit, etc. and did everything to solve it without reaching out to support:
- Full reset twice.
- Bought a third satellite (so now router + 3).
- Wired all satellites to the router instead of using WiFi backhaul. (remove WiFi backhaul issues from the picture)
- Reconfigured WiFi channels used carefully to avoid overlaps with other routers I have + possible neighbor routers.
- Even had smart plugs turn off the router and satellites at 3 AM every day, and bring them back online in order (router first, and then satellites a few minutes later).
The reboots sometimes happened once an hour when the system seemed to be under what should be normal load. My wife was laughing at me constantly for the poor reliability of something that's set me back $3K+.
Applied all my engineering thinking to it, until one day, saw a thread where someone suggested that router overheating may be the cause and that they bought USB based fans from Amazon to put them over the router unit.
This sort of made sense because I did not have this problem when only a few (4-5) of my devices were configured to connect to it. First I put an Airthings sensor above the router to measure heat. Airthings showed external temperatures at 94.3 F at peak and an average of 91 F. The operating temperature for RBR maxes at 104 so it was plausible that the internals were coming close to that. The ambient temperature (room temperature) when all this was happening was between 68 and 72 F.
Fans arrive (all of $18), have them running in series on top of the router - boom, temperatures at Airthings right above the router drop to 74 F. I left the Airthings there - the highest I've seen is around 80 F. Everything's stable immediately - up and running for 5 days+ like perfection.
The real questions here:
- Do those of us who have this issue have defective units (poor thermal paste application on the processor)? I live in a colder area so I am sure people in hotter states are very likely to hit this more often.
- Is this a design issue? I.e. the fan on the unit is not powerful enough and pushing out heat. It's obvious a stronger fan is all that's needed.
- Do I care to ask for support and RMA? I don't know - I've the support subscription paid for.
My goal of posting this here is 2 things - (1) give people facing this a clear answer - empathetically excited to share this given my frustration for weeks prior to this, (2) get thoughts on what I should do?
- I could do an RMA and see what temps the unit puts out in the exact same setup without extra fans outside.
