since a few days I’ve been running Umbrel on a Raspberry Pi 4 (4GB, in a standard case). So far I’ve only installed the mempool and btc-rpc-explorer applications, didn’t open lightning channels or anything else yet.
Everything seems to work fine but I noticed that the raspi runs rather hot. So I checked the temperature and saw that it’s well above 80 degrees and also that throttling is active. Looking at htop, it seems like bitcoind is producing a lot of load on the cpu.
Umbrel recommends an active cooling system, because it actively verifies all the blocks in the blockchain, so that uses a lot of CPU resources.
And on the very last line on the log, it says “The temperature of your Raspberry Pi is too high. We recommend either using a case that lowers the temperature of your Pi or a case with a builtin fan.”
Huh, where does that statement come from? The hardware list here in the forum as well as on the website does not say anything about active cooling, the recommended case uses a heatsink only. I mean yeah, the last line in the log tells me that now. But I guess it works for most people without a fan if it’s not in the list of recommended hardware.
because it actively verifies all the blocks in the blockchain, so that uses a lot of CPU resources.
Yeah I know, but in the days before it never got over ~70 degrees, so something must have been caused the spike in temperature. Also, by the way, this is after the initial block download, so there aren’t that many blocks to verify.
By the way, after letting it cool down and a reboot, temperatures leveled out at around 70 degrees again. I just want to make sure that there’s nothing unusual in the logs and these are just more or less random temperature variations.
Has anyone else tried to use the official raspi case for running a node? I guess it’s kind of trapping the heat inside the case, maybe I should simply switch to another one. There’s an interesting thread here where a guy is testing multiple different cases and the official one seems to be among the worst.
I’m using the Argon ONE V2 case, and had no throttling or high temperature issues. I wouldn’t have known that the original and official raspi case was that bad with temperatures.
I’m using the Argon ONE V2 case, and had no throttling or high temperature issues. I wouldn’t have known that the original and official raspi case was that bad with temperatures.
Yeah, seems to be pretty bad from this guy’s measurements, close to 90 degrees under load.
He also tested the Argon One and that one holds up well. I think I’ll order a Argon NEO, also one of his recommendations, and see if the temperatures are better there.
just in case someone’s still interested, the new case arrived some days ago. Since then I’ve been checking the temperature every once in a while and the difference is remarkably. With the official raspi case, temperatures never went under ~70 degrees, with the new one I never got over ~50.
So yeah, definitely avoid the official case and go with Flirc/Argon/whatever if you don’t want to fry your raspi.
I really love the flirc case but it wasn’t as effective as I thought and had to go back to fan cooling since my raspberry turned off every now and then.
@xphade how are you measuring your temperature? Does umbrel software provide temperature? or do you have an external device to measure? Thanks in advanced.
