Of all the Wi-Fi jobs we get called out to in Currie and the Balerno – Juniper Green corridor, this one is quietly the most annoying: the router isn't dead, the Wi-Fi isn't slow, it just keeps rebooting itself. The lights go out for thirty seconds, everything reconnects, and forty minutes later it happens again. It's not a fault the router will tell you about — there's no warning, no error, nothing in the app. And unlike a dead router, it looks like it's working, so people put up with it far longer than they should.
The good news is that in almost every case, the underlying cause is one of five or six specific things — and the diagnosis is almost always simpler than replacing the router. If you'd rather have someone come out and rule them out on site, our networking and Wi-Fi service covers Currie, Balerno, Sighthill-Wester Hailes and out to Livingston the same working day.
1. First, Establish the Restart Pattern
Before you touch anything, spend a day noticing when the router restarts. This one step tells us more than any other. There are three patterns that come up over and over:
- Almost exactly on the hour or half-hour — usually a scheduled reboot in the router's own settings, a common one on BT Smart Hubs and some Sky routers.
- Whenever the household load spikes — typically evenings when the TV, someone's Xbox, a smart doorbell and a work laptop are all pulling at once. This points at power supply sag, not the router.
- Random, no discernible pattern, several times a day — more likely a hardware fault, overheating, or a firmware bug interacting with a specific device on your network.
Write down three or four restart times over a day. If a fault ends up in front of us, that timing note saves us an hour of guessing.
2. The Number-One Cause: A Failing Power Supply Brick
This is by a mile the most common cause we see on the bench, and it's the one almost every online guide skips. The router itself is fine; the power supply brick plugged into the wall is what's failing. After three to five years of continuous use, the capacitors inside the brick lose their smoothing capability, and the voltage it puts out sags whenever the router draws a load spike — a big download, a video call, a firmware background task. The router sees the voltage dip, decides it's under-powered, and reboots itself as a safety measure.
The tell is that the brick often runs distinctly warmer than it used to, sometimes with a faint whistle, and a matched replacement PSU (same voltage, same or higher amperage, same polarity) makes the restarts stop immediately. In Currie last month we had a five-year-old Wi-Fi 6 router that had been "restarting itself" nightly for over a year; the customer had already tried factory-resetting it twice. A modest replacement PSU fixed it in about ninety seconds.
3. Overheating (and Where Your Router Actually Lives)
Modern routers run hot. Wi-Fi 6 and 6E chipsets in particular need airflow, and the thermal shutdown on most consumer models is set aggressively — if the CPU hits its limit, the router restarts rather than risk damage. The problem is that in real houses, routers get put in exactly the places they can't cool themselves: inside a cupboard under the stairs, on top of a Sky box, on a shelf pressed against a warm wall, or (a Currie classic in older detached homes) in a boxed-in porch shelf.
Two-minute check: put a hand on the top of the router after it's been on for an hour. If it's too hot to leave your hand comfortably on, that's your restarts. Move it into open air, raise it a few centimetres off the surface it's sitting on, and give it clearance on both sides. If it's genuinely trapped somewhere it can't be moved from — a wall-mounted enclosure, for instance — a small USB desk fan pointed at it is enough to stop the restarts for good.
4. ISP Disconnects Masquerading as Restarts
Sometimes the router isn't actually restarting at all — it's just losing its connection to the ISP for thirty seconds and re-authenticating. To every device in the house, the effect is identical: everything drops, then reconnects. The clue is the lights on the front. If the power light stays steady but the "internet" or "broadband" light flickers off and back on, that's an ISP-side drop, not a reboot.
Around Currie the vast majority of us are on either BT Openreach FTTP or a copper VDSL line. Copper lines in older properties are especially prone to this if the master socket is aged, the internal wiring runs alongside mains, or there's a corroded joint somewhere between the property and the cabinet. Modern FTTP is much better but not immune — a marginal fibre patch at the ONT can produce the same symptom. Our wider Wi-Fi troubleshooting guide walks through how to separate a router problem from a line problem in more detail.
5. Firmware Bugs and Automatic Update Windows
Most ISP-supplied routers install firmware updates in the middle of the night without asking you — and a genuine firmware bug can produce a reboot loop that stops after the next update rolls out. If your router only ever restarts once, in the small hours, that's an update window and it's completely normal. If it started restarting daily right after an update, though, the update itself may be at fault. On BT Smart Hubs and Virgin Hub 3/4/5 units this happens occasionally after a rolling update, and the fix is to wait for the next patch or ask the ISP to roll back your specific unit.
On your own kit (an ASUS, TP-Link, Netgear or similar router that you bought and set up yourself), the same rule applies but you're in control — check the manufacturer's release notes before installing a new firmware version, and never install a beta build on a router that has to just work for the household.
6. When It's Genuinely the Router Failing
After the PSU, the second hardware failure we see is on the router's own board — usually bulging or leaked capacitors on the mainboard, sometimes a failing flash chip that corrupts the firmware on every boot. Both produce a router that restarts more and more often over weeks, eventually gets stuck in a boot loop, and finally won't come up at all. If a fresh factory reset, a replacement PSU and a cool ambient location have all been tried and the restarts continue, the router itself is at end of life and the sensible answer is replacement.
For customers debating whether their current unit is worth keeping, our post on when to replace a home router covers the age and specification thresholds we normally recommend before spending money on a new one. And for the setup itself, router placement is the other lever that changes everything — a good router in a bad location will always struggle.
7. When to Repair, When to Replace
The rule of thumb we use on the bench is simple. A router under three years old with restart symptoms is nearly always worth diagnosing — a new PSU or a location change usually solves it, and the router has another few years of good service in it. A router over five years old with the same symptoms is on borrowed time, and even if the PSU is the immediate cause today, something else on the mainboard will fail within a year. That's the point to plan a replacement rather than pay to keep it going.
Wi-Fi 5 kit from before 2020 is also now noticeably slower than the fibre lines running into most Currie homes, so replacement often pays back in raw speed too — not just in stability.
Getting Help Locally in Currie
If your router is restarting right now and someone in the house urgently needs to be on a work call or a lesson, we can usually get to Currie the same working day from the Edinburgh workshop — we run the Lanark Road corridor for callouts in Balerno and Juniper Green on the same day. Our home visit computer repair in Currie covers the whole diagnosis, and for a scheduled fix rather than an emergency, our home and office callouts booking is the fastest route. If the deeper cause turns out to be the router hardware itself, we'll walk through options with you before spending anything on a replacement — and our hardware upgrades team can specify a matched router for your line speed and property size so the next one doesn't need replacing again in three years.
Last updated: 27 July 2026