How many watts does a Raspberry Pi 5 draw while mining?
A Raspberry Pi 5 mining Monero is a roughly 10–15 watt load at the wall for planning purposes, with a cooling fan and few accessories. That is an estimate, not a guaranteed measurement: your mining software, settings, cooling, and power supply can move the actual draw lower or higher.
What that watt estimate includes
For your electricity bill, you want wall power: the electricity drawn from the socket by the Pi’s power adapter. This includes the Pi itself, attached accessories, and electricity lost as heat inside the adapter.
A Pi 5 doing little work typically uses only a few watts. Mining keeps its CPU—the main processor—busy, so consumption rises. The 10–15 W planning range is more useful for sustained mining than an idle-power figure.
Your setup can draw more if you attach:
- A USB-powered hard drive or other accessories.
- An SSD, a type of storage drive.
- Extra fans.
- Hardware running at higher-than-standard speeds.
The official 27 W power supply does not mean your Pi constantly consumes 27 W. That rating describes the power it can supply, not what mining necessarily uses.
Why your mining settings matter
Monero uses RandomX, its mining algorithm—the rules for doing the calculations that help secure the network. RandomX favors CPUs, but that does not make every CPU equally efficient.
The Pi 5 has four CPU cores, which are processing units inside the chip. Using more mining threads—separate streams of calculations—can increase power use. It does not guarantee a matching increase in mining speed.
RandomX is especially demanding on memory and processor cache, a small area of fast memory. Its usual performance guideline is about 2 MB of L3 cache per mining thread. The Pi 5 has only 2 MB of shared L3 cache, so you should not assume four busy cores deliver four times the useful work.
Browser mining adds another variable. Your browser, the mining implementation, and any CPU-use limit can change both consumption and mining speed. A reading from dedicated mining software may not match what you see in a browser.
How to measure your own Pi
Use a plug-in electricity meter between the wall socket and your Pi’s adapter.
For a useful comparison:
- Measure the Pi while idle, with your usual accessories connected.
- Start mining with the settings you intend to keep.
- Let it run until temperature and power readings settle.
- Record average watts, rather than one brief peak.
Keep cooling enabled. If the processor gets too hot, it slows itself down to prevent overheating. That can reduce power draw while also reducing mining output.
The bottom line
Budget about 10–15 W at the wall, then measure your actual setup. Running continuously, that range uses approximately 0.24–0.36 kilowatt-hours per day; a kilowatt-hour is the unit your electricity provider bills you for.
Multiply that by your electricity rate to estimate daily cost. Low wattage alone does not mean profitable mining: you also need your measured mining speed and a live profitability calculator.
