Right before I started my paternity leave this summer, I finally bought a Raspberry Pi so I could use Pi-hole for network-wide ad+tracker blocking. Naturally, I had to install Netdata on the Pi to make sure I’m monitoring everything with per-second granularity.
This guide came out of that effort. If I can do it while helping take care of two young children, you can do it in a weekend!
I didn’t write about it in the guide, but the most fun part of the whole process was watching, in real-time, how big of an impact a case fan makes. With the fan on, Netdata showed the Pi holding steady at 50C. As soon as I took the fan out of the case, I watched in horror as it climbed up to 73! Needless to say I turned the Pi off and put the fan back in. The tiny whine is a small price to pay…
@joel I hate fans noise too, but you don’t have to put up with it
Just grab yourself a decent passive heatsink case. I have two Raspberry Pi 4’s with passive hatsink cases (more in a cluster stack) and they typically run around the 43-45 degrees Celsius mark (one is running pihole and cloudflared DNS over HTTPS proxy).
I do somewhat cheat a little because I have a 24-port switch (passively-cooled, no fans) and I sit the Raspberry Pi’s on top of that which in effect turns the switch into their extended radiator
PiMoroni sell good ones in various colours (I have the gold and blue and they are very nice):
I would have imagined that the switch would increase the temperature, interesting.
I am running my own personal web server on a raspberry pi, it’s get hot but who cares. It’s doing it’s work silently and efficiently, albeit without comfort. Actually, you can check the setup at blog.py | blog.py
balena.io used to sell some interesting heat sinks as well, and cheaply too if I remember correctly.
