Yeah for real. Cheap and plentiful on eBay as well. That’s where I get mine, and company surplus.

Very nice. I don’t like laptops for gaming, but I recognize and appreciate the utility of them; I use my laptop (Thinkpad T14 G1 AMD) more than my gaming PC for most things outside of that.

Worth a look. One monitor uses HDMI, the other uses DisplayPort. They’re just cheap secondhand 1080p monitors to get me by until I toss them for an ultrawide 1440p unit.

Any time I clear out the chest freezer to defrost or get to something at the bottom, the lower half stays below freezing for quite a while. Love that little freezer.

The monitors are part of a 12W draw left after shutting off the PC. The plug is measuring everything plugged into the power strip that powers all of my desktop equipment. The PC itself was drawing ~90W at idle.

It’s attached via USB to a 2014-era Mac Mini running OMV; it’s a dedicated NAS and nothing else. Honestly not a huge fan of that hardware setup at this point, as the Proxmox cluster running all of my VMs and whatnot sees it drop out periodically for absolutely no reason. I’ve already tweaked the network adapter within the OS to stay powered on, because apparently Apple hardware has a mind of its own and just decides to shut various components off for “power saving” reasons.

The kicker is that I’m upgrading it to a 7th-gen based server soon. My dad gave me an old Pentium 4-powered HP Proliant DL110 last year, the case of which has 10x 3.5" drive bays, and is fully ATX compatible, so I’m gonna drop in a 7th gen mobo with Pentium G4560T (already have that on my desk), a newer PSU, and an HBA card. Don’t need a ton of processing power for a dedicated NAS running OMV - just a lot of expansion capacity.

Laptops are pretty good at that. I run a few 7th and 8th gen 35W mini PCs in my server cluster (i7-7700T/i7-8700T), so hopefully that helps.

Definitely gonna check that out.

I use Kasm for remote access, I believe that has a WOL component as well. I haven’t set it up as such, but I plan to later on.

No idea. I would imagine it does, but that’s something I’ll need to check.

Very cool! However, my house is a rental, so any monitoring equipment has to be somewhat non-invasive.

Edit: it helps if I actually look at the product before spouting nonsense… Looks promising.

No idea, honestly, it’s just the default settings. I haven’t really had any time to tinker and optimize it to my liking for a while.

The PC was drawing ~90W. All solid state, no spinning rust. Lots of fans though, since it’s air-cooled. Not entirely sure what was causing the draw, but it’s definitely something I want to investigate at some point.

👀

Yeah… I know. 🙃

Yeah, anything Zigbee needs a hub of some sort that interfaces with the server. Zigbee is a mesh-like network of its own - it doesn’t use wifi or Bluetooth or anything.

I bought Nabu Casa’s Connect ZBT-1 dongle; it’s like $35 and plugs directly into the HA server. Super simple to configure as well, since HAOS detects it automatically. Plus, the smart plugs act as routers, so as long as there is a path of router-enabled devices that can see each other all the way to the dongle on the server, you shouldn’t need anything else.

Yep, it’s awesome. We got it for $300 to supplement the smaller chest freezer, and it’s been an absolute godsend.

One is a smaller chest freezer, about 3 feet tall, probably 6 or 7 cubic feet if I had to guess. The other is a Hamilton Beach upright freezer from Costco. Both are full, so that helps with keeping them cold.

I know they’re gonna be a power suck lol. Three mini PCs, a SFF PC, 4-bay hard drive docking station, 8-port switch, and a RPi0w… Hoping for a max of 200W, but I suppose we’ll see what happens 🫤