Migrating back to the original Raspberry Pi B+

I am constantly thinking about how to reduce the amount of energy my office and homelab uses. I am in the process of switching some services back to Raspberry Pi’s so I can set my homelab server to turn off at night.

This being said, I’m doing this without spending any money. I am going into the season when I hardly work, so hobby spending is at zero. Yes, it would be nice to spend thousands to upgrade my hardware to something more energy efficient, but that isn’t in the cards.

The hardware

I have a few absolutely ancient (by tech standards) Raspberry Pi devices laying around. Two are the original Pi 1 model B+, originally released in 2014. The other is a Pi 2 model B released in 2015. In case you forgot the specs on these bad boys:

Pi 1 model B+

• CPU: SoC Broadcom BCM2835
• RAM: 512MB

Pi 2 model B

• CPU: Broadcom BCM2837 (quad core!!)
• RAM: 1GB

These boards should be supported until 2026. They will reach EOL, but I still have a couple of years of use from them.

Power impact

As I thought more about my setup and how to reduce the energy impact, one of the ways I can do this is by having everything turn off for 8-12 hours a night. That would reduce the energy usage by 30-50% without having to spend a dime.

My homelab setup uses about 125w and runs 24/7. At that usage its about $13/mo.. I’v been okay with that cost since I don’t spend money on anything else. My homelab is my hobby and is where I have fun on weeknights.

I’ve been testing a couple of Pi’s running services I need to run 24/7 and each is only using ~1.5w. It will occasionally spike to 2w. My goal is to have two Pi’s running a couple of critical pieces I need and then turn off the homelab at night for a huge net reduction in power usage.

Let’s say the Pi’s average 2w. That’s 4w and over an entire day a total of 96 wH usage. With the server off, I will save 1,000 wH for a net reduction of 904 wH per day.

Reason for the move

Its really for one reason: PiHole. Every device in the house uses PiHole for DNS and there would be a lot of problems if the server failed to come back online or if someone was up late.

The first step in getting my server ready to turn off every night is to get the services that need to run 24/7 off it and onto a dedicated device that uses very little power. This is obviously a perfect usecase for the Pi.

Originally I had PiHole and my reverse proxy on two Pi’s. But, I moved them to virtual machines on the homelab box to reduce complexity. I had too much hardware running and I wanted to consolidate it all to just one box. My homelab was running 24/7 anyway, so an easy move. Its been running in a VM for a little over a 2 years at this point.

In addition to PiHole I am also going to move this blog to a dedicated Pi so it isn’t reliant on the homelab being on to function.

I also need to figure out how to move my reverse proxy. That is going to be tricky as I use swag from Linuxserver.io and they no longer make arm 32-bit containers.

I still have a ways to go, but things are rolling. The easiest to move is out of the way and so far I’m happy with the results.

A quick shoutout to the older Raspberry Pi devices. There are a ton of SBC’s out there and now mini PCs are a huge market, plus the new Pi 5 just announced this week. All of them use low power, but they all use more and more every year and can spike a lot higher. I know there’s usecases for them. Yet, our goal as technologists should be to always reduce our energy usage. That is in hardware and software.

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