How can a router explode?

[VirusDumb]

saw this on reddit

how does this happen and how to prevent this (my PC is next to my router and it's waht the ISP provided us with and it stays on 24x7)

[Average Nerd]

38 minutes ago, VirusDumb said:

how does this happen

Probably a power supply failure. How to prevent: place your rrouter in a spot where it can get enough fresh air to stay cool, and hope the PSU in it isn't a piece of junk.

It's not common for ISP routers to blow up, so you probably don't need to worry. And even if the router goes boom, you PC will most likely be completely fine (apart from a loss of internet connection).

[FlyingPotato_is_taken]

@Average Nerd The TP-Link C20 has an external PSU. Picture of what this model looks inside: https://openwrt.org/_detail/media/tplink/archerc20/tp-link-archer-c20-v4_board_top.jpg?id=toh%3Atp-link%3Aarcher_c20_v4

 

The PSU TP-Link includes is an isolated class II.  A failure that mains voltage could make it from primary to secondary is rare but could be an option. It would need a double insulation failure at the transformer for this to happen. The capacitor connecting primary and secondary side is the other failure point but again very unlikely.

 

What happend? From somewhere a high voltage, high energy pulse made it into the device. Likely cause could have been an lightning strike. 

[NadiaMayer]

A cap or transistor voltage regulator fails causing a short so that voltage goes in the wrong place and then poof and magic smoke goes out.  power surge can also do it too

[Needfuldoer]

Judging from that fried Cat5 cable and LAN port, I'm guessing power surge or lightning strike.

[Caroline]

Day 430 of asking users to upload images directly to the forum instead of hotlinking to whatever server (reddit I suppose) that's hosted in because some of us only see the post like this:

Spoiler

Oh and you also prevent link rot and broken posts, assuming LMG won't be deleting old uploaded images every few years.

 

On topic if something explodes it's usually a capacitor or a resistor, but said resistor must be large enough to cause physical damage to other components, you won't find those inside a router.

[Alex Atkin UK]

Considering the LAN port is what got fried, it seems more than likely the surge came in there and the scorch marks are from the SOC or ethernet isolation transformer going up in smoke.  Quite how it did so supposedly without damaging the PC is bizarre.

 

If the surge came from the router I don't see that it would go the long way out through the LAN switch and the ethernet isolation transformers.  I feel the OP is omitting some details, I see no way the PC survived that.

 

I had the phone line fried from lightening hitting the house and it didn't look that bad.  Although it was dialup days so it fried the modem and the PC motherboards IO chip had a nasty burn mark in it.  I also had old 10-BASE-2 networking which it fried the diode in every NIC, although the 10-BASE-T ports on those NICs still worked.