Tag: homelab

Noctua fans, IPMI curves, and undervolting techniques to make rackmount servers bedroom-quiet without thermal compromise.

Master UPS sizing math: VA vs watts, runtime calculations, battery replacement costs, NUT monitoring, and when EcoFlow beats enterprise hardware.

Raspberry Pi 5 vs Mini PC: when ARM wins, real costs with NVMe HATs, power consumption, performance, and ecosystem trade-offs for your home lab.

Head-to-head benchmarks: Intel N100/N305 vs Ryzen 7000 mini PCs. Power consumption, NVMe slots, RAM, transcoding, virtualization. Which one to buy.

Dell R630/R730 and SuperMicro buying guide for 2026. Real idle power draw, how loud they get, what to avoid entirely, and how to read an eBay listing.

Store years of sensor data with InfluxDB. Skip the 10-day limit, query historical trends, build Grafana dashboards for your home lab.

Batch transcode h264 to h265 or AV1 with Tdarr. GPU/CPU strategies, plugin flows, Docker Compose setup, and storage savings math for your media server.

Power monitoring with Shelly EM/Pro/3EM, Home Assistant energy dashboard, circuit-level metering, solar+grid tracking, and wiring sanity checks.

Z-Wave and Zigbee compared for 2026: frequency and range, how each mesh breaks, device cost, 2.4GHz interference, and which coordinator dongle to buy.

Matter and Thread protocol overview: what actually works in home labs, what's vaporware, and why you should be skeptical of the hype in 2026.

Home Assistant disaster recovery: off-site backups, secrets handling, Z2M coordinator, restore drills that catch missing pieces.

Calibre, Calibre-Web, and Kavita compared for a self-hosted ebook library. Format support, reading experience, and which one belongs on your NAS.