Abstract Two categories of terminals can exist in a wireless home ad-hoc network. These are battery-powered and outlet-plugged terminals. A new scheme for energy conservation in battery-powered terminals in wireless home ad-hoc networks is proposed. Based on this scheme, battery-powered terminals page traffic with a minimum power to the nearest outlet-plugged terminal and only outlet-plugged terminals are used for routing. Simulation results show that the mean radius of the battery-powered terminal paging area is much smaller than the radius for conventional schemes.