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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/Kat81inTX on 2025-05-22 22:00:09+00:00.

As someone who worked in the semiconductor industry for 30+ years, including a lot of work on SoC thermal management, I’m a bit embarrassed to say that I trusted a vendor to sell me a properly designed Raspberry Pi 4 kit back in 2021.

I should have paid more attention, as it took me almost 4 years to notice the processor has been running way too hot.

Here’s the CanaKit package I bought: https://imgur.com/M9OdLJc

Note that heat sinks were included, but no fan. I really should have been suspicious of a case with no air venting, but I’d deployed many RPi 1, 2 and 3 kits in similar cases with no problems. Of course, they weren’t running multi-core CPUs at 1.2 GHz.

Recently while tuning the system, I installed Glances and was surprised the processor temp was hovering around 80°C with fairly low processor load. The top of the case never felt too warm, which should have tipped me off that the CPU heat was not being dissipated efficiently.

I popped the top off of the CanaKit case and enabled the System Monitor Processor Temperature sensor to observe the temp for a few hours … it dropped to around 70°C almost immediately … still too high, in my opinion.

A quick search on Amazon found a cheap fan-less aluminum heat sink case: https://a.co/d/dQ9Oev8

Moving the RPi 4 to that case dropped the temp to around 55°C under a typical load for my setup: https://imgur.com/ZysJrRt

If you’re running an older Pi 4, you might want to check your processor temp to see if a cheap case upgrade will help you.