Reduce home assistant power consumption

Configuration
1

I’m running HA on a battery powered raspberry pi and need to get the battery to last longer. Any ideas?

What I’ve done:

  1. reduce weather update interval to 12 hours.
  2. reduce device_tracker gps logger interval_seconds to 86400 (I think that means it will look for new devices once/day.

What I can’t figure out how to do:

  1. reduce update interval for my ios devices that are being tracked.
  2. reduce the update interval for data from gps logger.
  3. Have my home assistant hibernate/wake up on a specified schedule
  4. Anything else that would reduce power consumption

Please point me in the right direction for documentation, teach me how to do any of those things, or share other ideas to reduce my power consumption. Thanks!

1 Like
2

For the sake of context:
Why are you powering on batteries?

3

raspis aren’t great on battery in general…

So…get a huge battery and charge it with solar OR plug it in to the wall.

4

I would also like to know why you are trying this, and what length of time your batteries last at the moment.

I don’t feel that the sort of changes you are talking about will actually make much difference to the battery life - the Pi is doing too much already as a Linux computer - but I don’t have any data about it so would also be interested to see how much difference it does make.

I don’t see how setting the gps_logger interval to once a day is going to be of any use for presence detection. How are you using it?

5

Ensure all radios are powered down and under lock the CPU by 50%?

6

Interesting question! I’m curious to know why you are running it of a battery?!

Nevertheless, I could think of some interesting use cases tho;

  • Boat automation
  • Mobile home automation
7

I’m running on a battery because I’m using the pi in my car. With a 10,000mah anker battery I can run the pi for about 30 hours right now. Right now I am just using it to control my locks, windows, and starter.

I think my best options right now are to under lock the cpu and to put a small solar panel on my dash.

8

Yes

Best option is battery charging off solar and have switch to car charging when car running.

Underclock

9

Found some interesting stuff here:

He does things like:

  • Disable a USB power hub to conserve power.
  • Disable video output
  • And of course, as already mentioned, down clock the CPU.

And then you have:

And maybe even:

http://www.uugear.com/witty-pi-realtime-clock-power-management-for-raspberry-pi/

11
  • Turn off the Pi LED’s
  • Disable HDMI
  • turn off unused radios, bt/wifi
  • turn off logging/recorder/history in HA

That’s all I cna think of right now

12

Which pi are you using? Using a lower spec pi may help also. The pi zero sips power compared to a Pi3+