Saving Money by Running Bitcoin on a Raspberry Pi
![Saving Money by Running Bitcoin on a Raspberry Pi](/content/images/size/w2000/2020/08/IMG_5711-1.jpeg)
I've been playing around with a Raspberry Pi and one question I wanted to answer was:
How much electricity will I save by running the Raspberry Pi instead of my desktop computer?
To answer this, I bought a cheap power meter that can be used when plugging in a device to understand the power draw.
First though, if you want to see the Raspberry Pi setup I am using, check this article. Second, if you want to see how I installed Bitcoin Core on the device, check this article.
Now to the data... I configured a Bitcoin node on Ubuntu and got the node synced. Once the node was fully synced and running in the state I would expect it to be in during normal operation, I was able to measure the power draw.
![](/content/images/2020/08/IMG_5711.jpeg)
The Raspberry Pi was drawing a stable 4.2 watts of power. I watched this for a few days and the draw stayed pretty stable at that level.
Next up is my tower desktop that I am currently running a Bitcoin node on. It is a Windows OS that hosts an Ubuntu VM running Bitcoin Core. I hooked the power meter up in the same way to see the power draw with Bitcoin fully synced and running.
![](/content/images/2020/08/IMG_5721.jpeg)
The power level hovered around 100 watts of power consumption.
If we use these stats:
- Raspberry Pi = 4.2 watts
- Desktop = 98.7 watts
We can see that the desktop uses 23.5 times the power draw to basically do the same job.
In San Francisco, I pay a whopping $.24373 per kWh. This is how the cost breakdown occurs:
Watts | kWh per Hour | Cost Per Hour | kWh Per Day | Cost Per Day | Cost Per Month | Cost Per Year | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Raspberry Pi | 4.2 | 0.0042 | 0.001023666 | 0.1008 | $0.02 | $0.74 | $8.97 |
Desktop | 98.7 | 0.0987 | 0.024056151 | 2.3688 | $0.58 | $17.32 | $210.73 |
It turns out that I can save $201 per year by running my Bitcoin node on the Raspberry Pi, assuming I don't run the Desktop except when I need it for other uses.
You can see from this article that I paid around $280 for the setup, so it will pay for itself in about 1 and a half years (17 months).
This seems like a good idea for anyone else that lives in a high cost of living area with absurdly high power costs.