Hi,
Anyone know how to reduce Pi 5’s power consumption - sits there doing nothing consuming a whopping 4 Watts (more than a Windows 11 laptop).
Do a fresh install of bookworm Lite, with nothing attached (other than power), do update and full-upgrade, eeprom POWER_OFF_ON_HALT=1, reboot and ‘top’ shows one task running (itself) - power meter shows 4 Watts.
A bit silly really and makes the Pi 5 and NVME Base file server or media centre idea a non-starter.
Hope someone has some suggestions
I think that setting is about reducing rpi5 power consumption after shutdown. Read this page.
Power consumption reported by users at rpi forum, varies by few watts. Maybe try & disable wifi/bt?
Thanks for reply. Re first link, yes that’s the page I got the hint from - doesn’t do anything for my Pi 5, still using 4W on halt! Re second link, quite something that one person is seeing 8W on idle!
Bottom line is the Pi 5 is hardly fit for purpose. Think Raspberry Pi are out of their depth with more powerful hardware - should keep to Zero and Pico and not waste our time/money making badly engineered wannabe-PC machines!
I don’t recall if Debian halt is the same as a full shutdown, but on full shutdown & that config it should be less than 0.1W as reported by other users. I am checking what to buy as external device to do those measurement.
How are you measuring that power consumption ?
Re measuring power, varies: power meter plug, usb device, multi-meter. See pic - 2.3W in halt, it seems to vary. Found that cheap power meter plugs are easy to use and accurate enough. Of course, with Pi 5 the consumption is nicely indicated by the warm glow from the underside! - for me, an engineering problem that should have been sorted pre-production.
Just to say, I’ve had V1 B+ models as media server and house BMS running for 10 years, no problems. Also have a 3 B+ with a camera in a jar underwater in a pond which has been running for 2 years! I do like my Raspberry Pis but not the 4 and less so the 5 - can’t see the point (not powerful enough to run a pc / not efficient enough for 24/7 365 projects).
If you don’t see near zero power after shutdown, you are doing something wrong. Headless and idle, you can expect something like 2.5W. Maybe you have peripherals attached. Even with a NVME I see no more than 3W in idle state.
Of course you can have lower power systems, e.g. with a CM4. But that is the price of computing power. The Pi5 is the first Pi that saturated 1GBit ethernet with rsync/scp transfers. So for a fileserver doing pure SAMBA/NFS, you can stick with Pi4. As soon as you use encryption, you will need more cpu-power.
I’ll choose to ignore the standard “it’s the user’s fault” nonsense.
Basically, then, Pi 5 is for highly specialised, compute-heavy applications. I agree.
@John-one sorry, I did not want to offend you.
Please have a look at this post: Nvme base problems! - #38 by bablokb
Here you can see the Pi5 (plus NVME-base plus M.2-SSD) running. On the left you can see it booting, then you have an idle-phase at about 550mA. In the middle is a phase with heavy I/O followed by a second idle phase. Far to the right you can see the power-off current by nearly zero. So idle consumption here is about 2.75W. I compared that with my old data from a Pi4 (dto) and a Pi3B+ (2.5W). So it is not that much different. And all other Pis will have 0.5W after shutdown. The near zero current-draw after shutdown is unique to the Pi5 and really helps in a lot of situations. Needless to say there are use-cases which are not suited for the Pi5.
So if you see 4W in idle instead 2.75W and if you don’t see near 0W after shutdown, then something is wrong. And that is the purpose of this forum: if you want to fix your high current consumption, then you have to supply more details about your setup. If you are convinced that your setup is already perfect and it is a problem of your Pi5, then think about contacting support and returning it.
@John-one
Hi, on the PI 4 you needed to set the GPIO power option ?
WAKE_ON_GPIO=0
Not sure if still needed on the PI 5!
Regards
[EDIT]
Apologies.
Just checked on my PI 5 and I get <1w with just adding the POWER_OFF_ON_HALT=1
If you only want to measure voltage/current, the cheapest solution is an INA260 (or INA219, but the latter maxes out at about 2A so you don’t have headroom). The INA219 measures down to 1mA, so it is also useful for low-power MCU measurements.
I can also recommend the ODroid SmartPower3. This is not only a measurement device, but also a two channel power-supply supporting up to 15V. It is not as beefy as most large bench power supplies, but for SBCs it is absolutely sufficient. It is less suitable for MCUs.
Thanks, I think SmartPower 3 is used in your shared measurements & is interesting for the low cost. One note is that given this is an external device, one cannot get the exact current consumption by the pcie device, only the differential under some load which is ok. I checked & there’s no means to get that via the OS neither.
Maybe one can rig up & connect an ammeter (SmartPower 3?) on the 5V pads on the base & use an external power supply.
RE Smart Power 3
I went to “Odroid UK” the other day to order the Smart Power 3, but they want to add £13 extra to the order as low value!! Will have to wait until I need something else.
BTW I have a “Nordic Power Profiler Kit II”. Its excellent for measuring low power for battery projects but does go up to 1A so could be used monitor the SSD power to the Pads.
Regards
That is a great tool (and I use it too for sub 1mA currents, but it only measures current and not voltage. So if your problems are due to voltage-drops, you cannot see it. Otherwise, very useful but 118€ is expensive. The INA219 which does the same except below 1mA is only a few bucks.
