A RPi is going to be smaller, quieter, and 10x more energy efficient though…
There are probably a dozen things you can do to save energy on orders of magnitude higher than using a pi.
Then do them. It’s still not going to decrease the energy use of your server.
Like: using the pi to manage your HVAC more efficiently.
Why use a pi instead of a microcontroller?
At the HVAC control level it would be a Pico - for the development / maintenance time efficiency: I know how the tools work, I know the community support is there, the hardware is easy to find and available relatively reliably, although ESPHome on the ESP micro-controllers is pretty good too.
Power consumption is a massive reason to really not do that. Its cheap for a reason, its takes a shitload of power to be shit and you will pay more in energy than you save in hardware unless its only powered on for short periods of time - a server typically isn’t.
This is actually something that applies to cheap products too. Was in Asda a little while ago and saw 2 LED bulbs with the same lumen rating. Cheaper one used 3w more and you only saved £1. Running it for 8 hours a day for a year would cost double that saving in electricity. For a server you are looking at almost £2 per watt each year. Does that ewaste look so good to you now?
Some things are absolutely worth getting second hand, but you really should be careful considering the power cost as well.
Quick edit: If you don’t need it running 24/7, consider something like AWS too. I love selfhosting but if its not running much it might be cheaper to not bother buying hardware.
This is generally not true. If you are using your laptop as a home server chances are it’s going to be idling 99% of the time and laptops are generally pretty good in terms of idle power draw if you manage to disable the screen (or just disconnect it, take it off and find a way to repurpose it)
And in terms of environmental impact saving a laptop from landfill is definitely better since the majority of a computers impact is from the co2 emmissions from the manufacturing process. And this isn’t taking into account the likely ethical considerations such as supporting terrible mining practices for resources like cobalt.
This is generally not true. A small server running on an old pi when idling will have hardly any draw. It will cost literally pennies to run for the whole year.
A rasperry pi idles at about 2 watts vs a laptop that idles at about 4 watts. At $0.30/kwh (a very high price for electricity) you would save 5 dollars per year on electricity. This laptop trades blows with the rasperry pi and costs half the price (55$ aud vs over 200$ aud for a brand new pi 5) Even this second hand one costs 110$ aud which is twice the cost. With that cost of electricity it would take 11 years in order to break even. And that’s only if you consider monetary cost and not environmental cost.
That’s not the point here. People probably do not need a pi 5. There are many other pi devices (and similar boards) with significantly less draw.
But I MUST CONSUME MORE ELECTRONICS
Are you living on a space station? What is this shitload of power? A whole 60 watts? Are you rationing AA batteries to run your household?
What is it with the bullshit fanciful rationalizations people come up with to consume consume consume?
And that’s 60W while charging. In idle with the screen off, low end laptops often consume as little as 2-3W. Which is not far off from a pi.
But I want to be cool and awesome! I want to constantly re-learn how to do basic things over and over because TECHNOLOGY!!!
https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23718473&cid=65450499
And I think China is evil and dumb… but I click “add to cart” on aliexpress in my sleep!
But I am deeply worried about totally renewable energy consumption by buying an endless stream of disposable baubles!
(Read above in some kind of sarcastic tone)
Are you living on a space station? What is this shitload of power?
Some of us live off-grid and make every Watt-hour we consume. So it may be that one man’s fanciful bullshit is another man’s daily life. For context, this is my 2,461st day offgrid.
A whole 60 watts?
Over the last 30 days I’ve averaged 2.01kWh/day, or an average constant consumption of 84w. All in. And that’s on the high end for folks in similar use cases. In this scenario adding in another 60w would be significant (ie, impossible for my rig during winter months).
As Sesame Street taught showed us it’s a matter of perspective.
Um if you’re living with computers are you really „off the grid“ computers require the grid to be manufactured. If you’re off the grid because you worry about the way the worlds going and you think you’ll need to be off the grid to survive I wouldn’t make having access to computers part of the plan.
60w is like £120 a year, these costs add up to the point that low spec servers pretty much always cost more in energy than hardware. Of course it also depends on where you live and your energy rates.
You could buy a 20 year old server that is going to use 800w, or you could buy a mini PC that is probably more powerful and uses like 10-20w.
Then again, I used to live somewhere that energy was included in the rent so short of starting a bitcoin farm usage wouldn’t really get noticed too much. In that case it would make sense to just go cheap hardware.
I’m glad I don’t have these addictions people seem to have. “I need a computer to measure how much water my toilet uses!” “I need a computer in my refrigerator!” etc
We’ve passed the useful stage of computing, we are now in the “personal issues” phase.
Aren’t laptops typically very energy efficient? Low consumption converts to high battery life, which is a priority for laptop hardware.
Some of them consume less than 10W.
There’s lots of ways to make existing hardware more efficient at the cost of performance. Under-volting the CPU and RAM (or just putting them in “efficiency” mode) can probably save more electricity than you lose in generational improvements. Considering how much more powerful PCs are compared to SBCs, you’d probably still have better performance than an SBC. Also, a more powerful CPU that takes double the power but as a result can idle for more than 50% of the time would be more efficient than a less powerful CPU never idling.
There’s a lot of other variables (like idle power draw, efficiency at various power levels, idle latency, etc), but in general I think your statement would be inaccurate at least 60% of the time.
Oh I am not saying specifically get a raspberry pi, personally looking at a bee-link N150 mini PC. It isn’t even that much more expensive than the 16GB raspberry pi and as its x86 I can just run normal debian installs in proxmox.
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.
Your energy is clearly a low cheaper than mine then.
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.
these shitty win8 laptops are surprisingly low power and efficient though.
Power consumption is a massive reason to really not do that. Its cheap for a reason, its takes a shitload of power to be shit and you will pay more in energy than you save in hardware unless its only powered on for short periods of time
Ewaste computers actually tend to be on par if not better than an RPi in power consumption these days. It might feel like a RPi should be more efficient given the size and USB power connector, but modern Pis consume a solid 10-20w while in use which is more or similar to most miniPCs (they idle at single digit watts now and can “race to sleep” more effectively than a Pi) while costing about the same and the Pi is far less upgradeable
That depends if the mini-PC is something in the Celeron / N100 family, or the Core i5/i7 family.
Should see an old 6th gen i5 mini PC on a power monitor. It’s basically nothing!
Yeah, they’ve reversed that trend for sure.
lowendtalk, hella cheap vps with plenty of resources for most self hosted apps, the issue with it is usually storage space but there are ways around that connecting your drives from elsewhere
Warning tho, hella shills too but you could literally make a post asking if certain companies on the site that have active threads are scams and get valid responses that don’t get removed or anything so thats nice, like half of the ones I looked at were giving less resources than they claimed
It’s a good idea until you consider the fact that a Raspberry Pi will be astronomically more power efficient.
If you think in flops per watt, maybe a little bit, but not a lot. Do you have one or two good procs for almost free, or half a dozen new sbcs at $100 each? Takes a while to save back that amount in power.
My question is usually not how many flops, but how quickly and reliably those watts can give me just a few flops on demand.
Get them from where? I always read about these basically-free computers but have yet to see one
Facebook marketplace, kjiji, etc
Everyone here thinks their shit tier 2018 laptop is made of gold or something.
‘Gaming laptop, only used occasionally. Been sitting around for a while because my kid’s got a new hobby. £1,200 no offers. I know what I’ve got’
The pictured laptop has a Centrino sticker on it and looks like it’s been used to dig a garden
Same here in México, a lot of people think their dual core Intel from 2011 (and even older than that) is still worth more than +$100USD. Even worse, companies usually want to resell devices to recover some of the cost, so even that option is kind of expensive. I’m waiting for some friends that can buy company devices for cheap so they can resell them to me for cheap too lol
Yep. My FB Marketplace is 75% crackheads flogging off stuff they stole from shops/actual tax payers/their neighbours/ the train, 10% delusional idiots with shit that isn’t worth half of their asking price, 10% scammers, and 5% not shit listings.
Pawn shop I would say but they are expensive too… Their is some carricatibe structure which refurbish computers and sell them gor dirt cheap. 20 Buck per tower. But that crapy computers.
I wouldn’t touch Facebook with a 10’ ethernet cable. Haven’t heard of kjiji, I’ll have to check it out.
Haven’t heard of kjiji, I’ll have to check it out.
It’s essentially Craigslist, but in Canada.
Craigslist doesn’t really have a user base here.
Except in Vancouver. It’s a Craigslist city.
Interesting… I wonder why?
You’re missing out, Facebook marketplace is THE place to buy local secondhand goods for dirt cheap without getting scammed. You do need an account but you don’t need to install anything, and the payments are not done through FB
Did someone fall asleep on the keyboard when they came up with kjiji?
I think it’s secretly Khajiit’s new marketplace for wares if you have the coin
I know its not the most ideal place, but FB marketplace where I live has lots of old PCs/Laptops for under 50 eur. I would probably start there personally.
Sometimes you can find them on eBay.
I go to Ebay and sort by distance. It’s like Craigslist but they send it to you!
I do e-scooter mechanical stuff, I always have a bid war with the local franchisee scooter shop nearby fighting for the scooters. I know its them, so I try to raise the bids for them as much as possible to fuck them around.
We have bins around our city for people to drop electronics off for recycling. I’ve taken a few laptops from there. You’re not supposed to, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
One I gave to my buddy who needed something just for emails and web browsing and whatnot, one is running a server, and a couple more went back in to the bin because they were actually broken, but I took the hard drives for the server machine. I have one on a self ready in case the server machine dies so I haven’t gone looking for any new ones in a while.
eBay, work, friends/family, friendly ask of your work’s IT person, or just call up the local recycling/ecycling company and ask
Yeah… no. Old laptops idle at around 50 °C.
That just means they become 100% efficient in winter!
Idk, heat pumps have become a lot more popular in recent years.
my 20 year old pc runs at ~5°C above room temp under load
You really shouldn’t be spending your days in a room at 45 °C.
you are joking, but my room actually feels like that.
All computers are single board computers if you take out their guts and tape them to a board
And they passively cool better that way much of the time too…
Technically a Pi is a single chip computer but they’re called an SBC because they replaced stuff like a Motorola 68HC11.
Where are these cheap e waste laptops with gpio and actually low power?
Digging through e-waste bins is one of my hobbies.
What kind of place do you go to to find these things? Sometimes I get really lucky (see my post history about my wonderful new printer), but if I could increase my odds that would be cool.
I’m just lucky enough to have one at my apartment building, and very wasteful neighbors.
Back when I lived in a (quite nice) apartment building I was constantly surprised at the things people threw out. Perfectly good furniture but also stuff like perfectly functional printers, artwork, computer cases…
If you go near college housing there’s usually a given day of the year (either moving day or an official cleanup day) when tons of people put out stuff they don’t want to bother with keeping/moving. It’s Hippie Christmas baby!
any luck with gpio and 5W power usage so far?
Worth noting pie 4 and 5 no longer recommend 5w PSU. And tend to fail if anything is drawing on the USB.
No, but I did get an Xbox that only needed a power cable.
I think 5W probably can’t be achieved, maybe with chromebook-like hardware, but I guess GPIO could be solved with a USB accessory
in my opinion the bigger problem is the fire hazard of an unsupervised charger. I have seen enough that runs super hot, and even if it doesn’t, I just can’t trust them.
Somebody already asked, but what are good locations to do this? Do you ever get harassed by property owners or law enforcement?
I’m in an apartment building, so I just browse the one here whenever I take the trash out. I don’t think anyone has noticed, or they’ve elected to mind their own business if they have.
There’s so much stuff that could still be used that it honestly isn’t funny, and that’s just in my own bin. How much more is being wasted across the country? But at least it’s in the recycling and not the trash, so that’s something, I guess.
No gpio but old centrino laptops make excellent low power servers. My primary server was a first gen centrino from 2011 up until recently and I think it only used 12w idle after putting a SSD in there. Had it’s own UPS built in.
There are usb gpio devices which can fulfill the connectivity bit. Pretty sure you are sol with the 5w though 😊
The Raspberry Pi Zero in USB gadget mode can be used for GPIO. If you don’t want to setup gadget mode, get Pi Zero W.
The market is about to be flooded with them with Windows 10 going EoL in October.
About to be? The bottom has been falling out for desktops and laptops on processors not on Microsoft’s supported list for the last year or more. I’ve seen roughly the same system go from ~$200+ down to under $100 on the last year based on eBay pricing alone
I have one of those 8.1 laptops - I LITERALLY fished it out of a dumpster.
You’ll have no end of problems and won’t know whether it’s a hardware or software problem.
Damn straight. Another reason not to buy a pi.
Its all fun and games until the power bill arrives. Performance per watt is important, please look at that first. Don’t be me.
Yeah… I’m not going to stick a clunky old laptop on top of my bookshelf and have it run 24/7 as my PiHole. My Pi Zero 2 W is far more appropriate.
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, 17:54:59I have never felt the need to have a wired connection for my DNS/DHCP, since such a trivial amount of data exchanges hands. The quality of the wired connection if it had one would similarly have negligible impact, surely.
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.
I guess I am pretty far from saturating my WiFi in any way, the removal of cables with little to no impact on connectivity was far more of a priority for me. I have never noticed a WiFi related outage or performance loss.
I will say this: we had a big lightning strike a few years back and it conducted into the house via the internet cable, then spread via the ethernet cables taking out everything that was wired (over $7K in damage) - devices connected only by power and WiFi were mostly spared.
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.
But… that’s so uncool…
I should have rebuilt an old coffee maker in to a Pi Hole instead. I’m such a rube.
Only if you’re running it at full load all the time and comparing that to a comparable number of raspberry pis it would take to do the same amount of work. Also, only if you live in a cold climate and the heat generated is not a concern and power is supplied by a renewable source so power isn’t a concern.
I mostly agree, and did the same with my second gen lab build - instead of shiny new NUCs like I had used round 1, I bought old off lease Dell Xeon boxes. SO MANY PROS -
- Got them up to 14c/28t each
- They can take GPUs and actually do heavy transcoding/ML work
- They can take up to like, 128GB of memory, which is GREAT when they’re all hypervisors
The downsides can’t be denied though -
- Even without the GPUs and beefed up CPUs, they are power hogs - the CPU alone uses more than an ENTIRE NUC
- They run HOT
- They run LOUD
The same holds true for off-lease SFF stuff, Lenovo and the likes …
So while reuse/repurpose is absolutely of the utmost importance, no question - when it comes to technology and how quickly it advances and miniaturizes, a thorough and logical pros/cons list is often required.
I’d add another option though - if you do need what a Pi brings to the table - do you really need a shiny new Pi 5? Is it possible a used Pi 3 or Pi 4 would do the trick, and check the reuse box?
The power aspect is a lot bigger of a factor than I would have thought. I had an old computer I was going to use as a server for Foundry that I could keep up all the time, but when I measured its wattage and did the math, it would cost me $20 a month to keep on. A pi costs like $2 to keep running, so it paid for itself pretty quick
And for some (including me) that’s our only computer (other than phone). I just can’t afford anything, so all I have is a shitty laptop from 2010 that barely plays 1080p video. I deeply want something better, especially a steam deck, but doesn’t look like that’ll happen anytime soon (or ever). And then you see people have steam decks that just sit there, unused, gathering dust… fuck.
Consider buying used hardware from an office. Lots of places sell used gear for dirt cheap. A used office desktop with a used GPU from the last 3 years or so would be a massive upgrade without spending much.
Steam Deck is still a good deal for what it is though, but I wouldn’t use it as a primary workstation.
You want a steam deck to replace your only computer?
Why not? especially when it’s a laptop from 2010
They make a quite capable desktop machine when plugged in, with the benefit of portability, and definitely better than a 2010 laptop
Honestly, if you’re in the States I have a bunch of HP ProDesks that my wife would be very happy to see disappear from our basement (I bid on an auction I didn’t expect to win lol). I’d happily send one for the cost of shipping
The only caveat here is the fire-hazard non-removable lithium batteries.
This is, in my mind, one of the benefits of laptops over micro computers: integrated UPS. Even an old, degraded battery will probably get you a couple of hours with the screen off.
IME, power consumption is going to be worse overall, for any laptop likely to be in the recycle bin, it’s probably double the consumption of an ARM SBC. The integrated UPS and usually decent power conditioning of the power supply saves you more money with a laptop. Plus, keyboard and screen for emergencies - I just generally expect that, over there life of a micro I’m going to have to drag out and plug in a spare keyboard, mouse, and monitor because something in a device, or an upgrade, or BIOS flash, is preventing a boot.
There are a lot of good reasons to use laptops instead of SBCs, if you don’t mind the extra power draw and (as she says) don’t have size requirements.
They make batteries for raspberry pi too you know.
No, I didn’t. I don’t use Pis, I have ODroids. Heck, they may sell batteries for ODroids, too.
For me, it wouldn’t have made much difference because I have UPSes around the house serving things like routers, modems, and switches. And I do care about size and energy use. I’m only saying there are advantages to using laptops.
You can get little integrated LCD cases for Pis too, can’t you? And maybe even a little fold-out keyboard. Congratulations! You’ve re-invented the laptop!
ODroids don’t meet European legal hazard levels on poisonous fumes. I bought one back in the day and they explained they won’t apply for the test because of “the cost”… not that it uses cheap solder that don’t meet lead limits.
I didn’t know this.
Replacement is usually removing 6-10 screws and prying the case with a guitar pick or old credit card. There is most likely a disassembly video on youtube. Batteries from aliexpress or the like are usually cheap (although probably more expensive than the computer). Depending on the application, the “built-in UPS” can be nice.
but what will fix the fire hazard of the charger? how will you be able to keep it plugged in 24/7?
I do SMB support, so I have a pretty good idea of what people tend to do.
I haven’t seen a PS brick catch fire (possible, OFC, but extremely rare in my opinion) i have seen a PC PSU catch fire, and because of the fan, it’s fucking scsry, like a jet with the afterburner.
Not simple to remove. They can all be taken out.
But the fire risk is a very valid point. All laptops should indicate they should not be left alone when charging. While many do. Setting one up in a unobserved location to run permanently should be batteryless or Lifepo4 adapted. So laptops may not be best suited to this environment. A used thin client or other DC input option may be much easier. Or an old desktop if batts and not wanted.
‘non-removable’ lol
