Im currently working on a personal project to have a raspberry pi operating remotely without mains power on a 24/7 basis.

This has raised a lot of questions about whats required to achieve this task, mainly around solar panels and batteries.

I have found a couple articles around raspberry pi power consumption vs raspberry model. I found working with the theoretical max’s always leads to disappointment.

So this is the first of a series of experiments which will step by step lead us to the figures we need to achieve our objective.

In this first experiment we are connecting a Raspberry Pi B with a USB Wifi dongle purchased on eBay. We are finally using a USB power bank (30,000mha).

I have connected these devices together and written a script on my desktop which will poll the raspberry pi on the network and log the results. I will attached the command used to achieve this, just in case you want to conduct come tests yourself.

After charging the power bank fully, running the raspberry pi lasted for 11hours and 51minutes. So  short of the required 24 hours. Ill be testing different power banks to get an understanding about quality.