Healthy Living/ Springhouse Turtle Lives

Why Turn Off Your Wifi at Night?

black wifi router with 2 lights on

Do yourself and your family a favor by spending $8 for a mechanical timer that turns your wifi off at night and turns it back on in the morning. Why? Because we all need to reduce our exposure to unnecessary radiation.

A few researchers claim wifi is safe, but I’m not sure. Some researchers doubt the safety claims because home wifi is so new that we don’t have long term studies proving otherwise.

Remember when doctors promoted cigarettes as safe? Of course you don’t, but they did! Waaaaay back in the 1930s and 1940s, doctors were featured in advertising telling consumers that smoking improved their health!

There was little research in the 1940s proving the multitude of dangers to human health posed by smoking cigarettes, but there is now. (The tobacco industry fought the truth for decades.) I don’t know a single person who smokes cigarettes, although I know a few who quit in the face of overwhelming evidence that smoking shortens your life and leads to cancer and many other diseases.

Wifi is still in the 1940s “yaaa, it’s great and healthy!” stage, so I’m wary of it. I use both wired (ethernet) and wifi to connect to the internet in my house.  It’s logistically impossible to put wired internet connections in every room of my house at the moment, but I would if I could. Were I building a new house, I’d put wired internet connections in every room.

Here’s the timer I attached to my router that turns the internet off every night and back on every morning.  (I unplug the router when I’m going on vacation, just because.) I plug the timer into the wall, and the router plug into the timer. It works like a charm, and I never have to think about it. Also, the automatic shut-off of my internet (wired and wifi) reminds me to get off the computer and go to sleep (I’m a night owl), which is useful.

My kids in college are exposed to wifi 24/7. There’s not much (not anything) I can do about that. They have no access to a router, so can’t shut off the wifi, which is ubiquitous on campus. I wish my kids’ colleges offered wired internet in every dorm room and shut down wifi at night at least, but so far, they don’t.

If you want to read more about the dangers of wifi, here are more links to the recent research. I look for independent research that’s not been funded by industry, which is not always easy to determine. A review of many studies found that exposure to wifi 24/7 caused damage to male rat reproductive systems. There are no human studies (yet), but why wait? I’ve read enough to convince me that wifi is likely not safe for any of us to be exposed to 24 hours a day.

As my husband likes to say, “When in doubt, leave it out.” So, spend a few bucks on a mechanical timer that turns off your wifi at night. It’s a very worthy investment in protecting your family’s long-term health.

Springhouse Turtle

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