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this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2026
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That's incorrect. I knew what I wrote because I care about this and I researched exactly this when I built my own Gemini Server with a Raspberry Pi B. Such a server is the overwhelming part of the time idle. And when idle, the Raspberry Pi B draws around 360 Milliwatt, or 0.36 Watt.
Here are the measurements:
https://raspi.tv/2016/how-much-power-does-raspberry-pi3b-use-how-fast-is-it-compared-to-pi2b
And moreover, an USB power supply does not draw its rated power when the energy is not consumed (it can't physically, it would become quite hot). Powe supplies sold in the EU draw max 1 W idle due to EU regulations.
But even better, a Raspberry Pi connected to an Internet router like a FritzBox does not need an own power supply. It can be powered by the routers USB ports which are there for example to plug in flash memory sticks.
And this actually works well - that's how I built mine. So, it draws 0.36 Watt of power.
The question is, why do you state things here that are not true? Who would be interested in spreading misinformation on the topic of a decentralized, democratic from the base information infrastructure?
Oh, I see I made an error here:
The page I cited gives the power consumption in Ampere, it is 0.360 Ampere.
This is not, and this is what I overlooked, equal to the power consumption in Watt.
What applies here is the formula
where I is current in Ampere, U is Voltage, and P is Power in Watt. And while I is 0.36 Ampere, U is 5.1 Volt (see www.raspberrypi.com/products/power-supply) , so the real power consumption is
1.85 Watt (instead of "half a Watt").
The 5 A charger can deliver 25.5 Watt.
just going from experience. my pis tend to max out their power supplies unless they're oversized compared to the spec, leading to boot loops and brownouts.
Computers need more power when booting, because they are busy then and have a lot of input from starting processes etc.
The Raspberry Pis are no exception to this. And the USB specification provides the necessary power for booting.
In my experience, you might need more than the 3A power supply when booting a Pi when it is connected to more than one hard disk.
On the other hand, in a server process, the server is usually most time idle waiting for input, and working a tiny part of the time to respond to the input. That's especially true for the Genini protocol where the server mostly copies data from a file to the socket, prepending the MIME type and some essential header data. This is not computing-intensive. Also, a Gemini server can run fine from an internal SD card, say with 32 GB size. No hard disk needed.
What is causing confusion here is mixing the specified maximum power requirement with the average power required to run the server. And the power-hungryness of the "modern web" was what I was referring to (and I think this was not ambiguous).
a web server also spends most of its time idle, and the power loads are on the clients.
A typical web page today transmits many Megabytes of data for at most a few kilobytes of real information. And much if that data is unnecessary JavaScript code which executes on the client, costing bandwith and power - for the sole purpose of ads and tracking.
GenAI-geberated pseudoinformation uses even more power.
Gemini omits all that. That's why it is lightning fast (and far more comfortable to read, like an eBook).
The pi 1, 2 and zero all run on 1.5a power supplies perfectly fine. I have 2 running 24/7/365. So max power is 15w. They don't draw anywhere near that when idle, but mine are rarely idle.