That’s sort of why this is on my mind.

I’ve just replaced an old Cubieboard (RPi1 alternative - about 2W) running Pi-hole and an old temperamental gigabit router (~10W) with a 2014 Mac mini (plus second Gigabit adapter) - which uses about 11W (a really efficient computer for its age!)

It’s less than the old combo drew - but I wonder if I could be accomplishing the same with an (or even a couple of) SBCs - and if that would ‘pay for itself’ (environmentally well as financially) after a couple of years.

> and if that would ‘pay for itself’ (environmentally well as financially) after a couple of years.

At 11W, the financial costs of running are quite low. I think it's about 90 kWh per year. Depends on your rates, but I've seen $0.60 quoted in comments lately as a high rate for PG&E customers in California, which is about $55. You might well be able to invest in something that can run your load for fewer watts, but I don't know if it's worth the effort.

You're likely to get a lot more savings by looking at things that use more energy.

Why is it NetBSD and which services do you have? I’d love to read about that, and I think I might utilise mine that way too.

NetBSD because I love simplicity and because it draws less power than running Raspbian.

It is running Gitea, Prometheus and a bunch of small tools I wrote (weather monitoring, home automation, family data sharing and tools for my Kids)

But how is it draw less power comparing to Raspbian? I’m not arguing, just curious how you measured that, and why NetBSD that much more efficient. I have a RPi2 with Raspbian, and another one with DietPi, I expect them to sip power similarly, considering they’re mostly idle anyway. Would love to read some blog on this though, if you happen to have one.

I too would like to see a side-by-side comparison but if we assume that the claim is true, one reason might be that NetBSD runs very few daemons after a default install. I run NetBSD on a handful of Raspberry Pi Zero machines, and it is really quite a surprise that they run as well as they do for a $5 computer. Your typical Raspbian install has a lot more going on after the default install.

> Your typical Raspbian install has a lot more going on after the default install.

I believe that this is true for just about all widely popular distributions. It's probably possible to set up Arch to have power draw similar to NetBSD, but you're going to have to know what you're doing and it's probably going to require more administration/attention to keep running smoothly than NetBSD does.

I had Arch installed on my RPi2s, but I didn’t like the need to update the RPi that frequently, wearing off the SD card. And later on, it became unsupported by Arch ARM. Now I use DietPi, and it’s my favourite Linux distribution (for an SBC server) so far. It has very small number of processes running too). So that’s why I’m curious whether it would be much different with NetBSD.

Do you use the built-in WiFi on any of the Raspberry Pis?

By coincidence I installed NetBSD last weekend on a Raspberry Pi. Never used it before, but it seemed very nice. I had some issues with sshd (most likely just me doing something stupid) and never got as far as experimenting with WiFi, but supposedly there is some support (unlike FreeBSD and OpenBSD that do not support WiFi on any Raspberry Pis?).

Not with any of the BSDs, although I have tried. Instead I either use a USB to GigE adapter or a Waveshare carrier board (for the Zeros). The built in NICs for the ones that have them usually work fine.

If you really need wireless you can buy a USB WiFi dongle, and since there is a lot of support a compatible one is restively easy to find.

I just measured it by myself with a domestic power usage tool.

That is fascinating, one of the reasons I hadn't done that is a concern about power management features. I'd read openbsd at least had them running flat out most of the time.