# Raspberry Pi 5B Power Use Offers a $9 to $16 Bitcoin Node Benchmark By Simon Yoon Canonical URL: https://www.tokenpost.com/news/technology/47574 Published: 2026-11-03T10:58:36.000Z Updated: 2026-11-03T10:58:36.000Z Section: Technology > A Raspberry Pi 5B drew 5.54 watts idle and 10.31 watts in a one-hour stress test. The annual estimates use the August 2026 U.S. residential average and are not measurements of a Bitcoin node. A Raspberry Pi 5B’s measured electricity use points to roughly $9 to $16 in annual power costs if the computer runs continuously. The estimate offers Bitcoin (BTC) node operators a rough benchmark, while storage and software upkeep add other considerations. The computer drew 5.54 watts while idle and 10.31 watts during a one-hour CPU stress test. At the U.S. average residential price of 18.16 cents per kilowatt-hour in August 2026, those readings work out to about $9 and $16 a year, respectively, if sustained around the clock. The study did not measure a Bitcoin node. Workload, storage, cooling and local electricity prices can change the actual bill. Storage depends on how much of Bitcoin’s history the operator keeps. A pruned node can run on about 15 GB of disk. Its first sync still downloads and verifies the full history, then removes older block data. Pruning reduces disk use, but it restricts older wallet rescans and services that rely on a complete transaction index. A node can give a compatible self-custody wallet a way to check payments and balances without asking an outside server which addresses it uses. The wallet must be configured to connect to the node for those benefits; a node running on its own does not provide them. Running a node alone also does not generate mining rewards. Software maintenance is another part of keeping the setup useful. Bitcoin Core’s 29.x release line left its regular maintenance window when version 32.1 arrived Oct. 27. Version 29.5 followed on Oct. 28 with a fix for a disclosed memory issue. An [Oct. 18 snapshot of reachable Bitcoin Core peers]() found 3,671 of 8,422 peers advertising versions on end-of-life release lines. Operators should confirm which release they have installed and apply relevant fixes. ## Links in this article - [Oct. 18 snapshot of reachable Bitcoin Core peers](https://www.tokenpost.com/news/technology/23841)