Well, the idea scales, if your energy is 0.33 Euro per kWh take the watts x 3 and that's your annual running cost.
MangoCats
joined 4 months ago
Yeah, they've reversed that trend for sure.
My WiFi routers have historically struggled a bit, I've got a decent one now, but even it is slow to manage the DHCP lists for fixed assignments by MAC address.
For me it's not about the bandwidth, it's about the lag and reliability. I have had strong WiFi connections flake out a lot more than wired connections.
Also, I just prefer to not have 100+ WiFi devices kicking around my network when more than half of them could be wired, or on another protocol like Zigbee.
That depends if the mini-PC is something in the Celeron / N100 family, or the Core i5/i7 family.
A good "rule of thumb" to remember: if your electricity rates average (somewhere near) $0.11/kWh you can take the average power draw of a device in watts and that is equal to what it will cost to run that device 24-7 for 365 days.
So, if that cheap PC draws 50W more than an alternate solution, it's costing you $50 more per year to use it.
Some tasks are beyond any RasPi, but it's well worth evaluating if something like an N100 fanless mini-PC can handle it instead of loading up some Core i7 rig that's going to cost more to run in the first year than the N100 costs to buy.
And they passively cool better that way much of the time too...
As a Pi Hole, the Pi 5 doesn't require active cooling.
Now, I am running a separate Pi 5 with a HAILO 8 for Frigate monitoring of a bunch of video streams, and it does need a little air movement, so I built a box with a 200mm fan pulling through a filter and I just threw all my Pis in there along with the Frigate rig so they stay nice and cool... I'm thinking that I should probably switch Frigate over to a Pi 4 for the h.264 hardware decoder, but the 5 is working fine for my needs and endless tweaking gets boring...
I agree that the Zero is up to the task, but I prefer a wired connection for my home DNS/DHCP server and if I understand correctly the Pi5 has better wired ethernet than its predecessors... Yeah, utilization is laughable, but there's something to be said for reduced lag time too:
Hostname: pihole
CPU: 0.2% on 4 cores running 318 processes (0.3% used by FTL)
RAM: 25.9% of 2.0 GB is used (7.4% used by FTL)
Swap: 35.9% of 512.0 MB is used
Kernel: Linux pihole 6.12.25+rpt-rpi-2712 #1 SMP PREEMPT Debian 1:6.12.25-1+rpt1 (2025-04-30) aarch64
Uptime: a month (running since Sunday, May 18th 2025, 17:54:59
I'm assuming the light/dark filter gets applied before they're ever incarcerated, but yeah, plenty of pre-judgement goes on at all stages of police decision making.
Typical isn't relevant in a corporate controlled image which they push automatic updates to. Whatever "typical" was can be changed with the next update push.
Got any bees in there?