Hey all, I’m looking to build a couple dashboards out around my house. I’ve done this before with rokchip boards and they are… fine, but not great. Is rpi the best option right now? Are there alternatives you really like? I’d like to keep it a single board to easily mount behind things where it doesn’t take up a lot of space, and I won’t lie I like the DIY feeling of it over something like a thin client.
You can get your 3b+ (and 3 even lower) to under 2W easily on idle. 3-4 is a lot. Check out some guides, basically disable BT, display out and WiFi.
So, basically don’t use it.
I mean, I get the effort, but if you account for your own labor, the power savings probably will probably take years to amortise - even with high energy costs like here in Germany.
Just as a rule of thumb: 1W of constant power costs is at most 25cents (40cent/kwh, which is even high for Germany).
Just as a rule of thumb: 1W of constant power costs is at most 25cents (40cent/kwh, which is even high for Germany).
The cost for a year is 1W24h365=8.76kWh which are at 0.4€/kWh 3.504€.
So with a difference of 3-4W you pay in a year between 10.5-14€ more than for the pi.
And i often heard the claim of thin clients idling around 5-6W, but i never got proof. Most things i saw are around 10W. Can you provide a picture? I would be really interested, honestly.
I use a cheap watt meter and the values from above are from that meter.
10-15W is what my Dell optiplex idles at.
I guess, it also depends on your load. My measurements were made at “basic setup idle”, so smb, k3s with a handful of idling containers, pihole. Since I’m the only user of these services and don’t use them that much, the load average is often enough way below 1 (at 4 cores). It’s absolutely possible that someone with higher demands and higher loads pulls more power on average.
