47

For those who have the Pi Zero W with them, what is its power consumption in the following modes:

  • No peripherals connected, WiFi And Bluetooth off
  • Only WiFi turned on
  • Only Bluetooth turned on
  • Only camera connected and capturing

I am aware of a previous question, but because it's older, that thread doesn't contain information about Pi Zero W and its specific features.

Ghanima
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HRJ
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5 Answers5

48

Based on the measurements made by RaspiTV, here are some estimates:

100 mA: No peripherals connected, WiFi And Bluetooth off
160 mA: Bluetooth turned on
170 mA: WiFi turned on
230 mA: Camera connected and capturing

Overall, using WiFi and accounting for the 5V power adapter, you are only looking at 1.1 Watts.

Ricardo
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I'm currently testing my RPi Zero W with temp, humidity and barometric pressure sensors hooked up. I have two 3,000 mAh batteries wired in parallel. They also go through an Adafruit regulator. Once I had my python script running, I disconnected the keyboard and mouse since they won't be connected when my final project is finished.

In this configuration, i was able to get 8 Hrs and ten minutes on my RPi 3B in the exact same configuration. I'll know today how long the Zero W will run and I'll post it here.

Update: In the configuration mentioned, it ran just a hair, (5 minutes) over 14 hours. All it does is read the sensors once every 10 minutes and insert them into a MySQL table. I'm also running Lighttpd web service. Hope this is helpful.

If you decide to go with Lithiium/ion batteries, be careful; there is some real garbage on ebay and amazon claiming to be 9800 mAh. They're garbage. These are an honest 3000 mAh. Good luck.

axslinger
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I have a Raspberry Pi Zero W Rev 1.1, running raspbian 10 (no special tunning) and pihole for my home network, so with Wifi enabled. I have recently switched it from a USB adaptor to one USB port of my network router (French Freebox Revolution) and it works perfectly. I tested the CPU load by running 2 yes program during 45min and had no issue. I don't know why I didn't do that earlier!

So I confirm that the power consumption is way lower USB 1.1 max 500mA.

Benoît
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I set up a Raspberry Pi Zero with Raspberry Pi OS Lite, running PiHole and nothing else. It uses a USB-to-ethernet adapter to talk to the network. It does not have any type of display running or attached.

I plugged it in to a Watt usage meter and ran it for 1260 hours (about 52 days). The Watt meter says the Pi used 1.95 kWh. This translates to about 1.55 Watts.

culix
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Just confirmed with a Sennheiser 5V 100mA power supply. pizero W with wifi and running a webserver. I've measured the power consumption and it does exceed 100mA - but still seems to work.

roocell
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