Home lab

Contents

  1. What is a home lab?
  2. Why have a home lab?
  3. What can you do with a home lab?
  4. My home lab setup
  5. What are some home lab projects?
  6. What are some home lab resources?
  7. Power consumption
  8. Final thoughts

What is a home lab?

A home lab is a personal computing environment that allows you to experiment, learn, and develop skills in various areas of technology. It can be as simple as a single computer or as complex as a network of servers, storage devices, and networking equipment.

Why have a home lab?

A home lab provides a safe and controlled environment to learn new technologies, test new ideas, and develop skills without the risk of affecting production systems. It allows you to explore and experiment with different software, hardware, and configurations at your own pace. A home lab can also be a great way to prepare for certifications, build a portfolio, and gain hands-on experience that can be valuable in your career.

Ever wanted to try out kubernetes? there’s k3s! How about hypervisors? there’s Proxmox. Your own media server? Plex, Jellyfin, Emby are at your disposal.

My home lab setup

Compute

  1. SFF PC
ComponentsDescription
CPURyzen 9 7900
Memory (RAM)Crucial 48GB DDR5-5600 SODIMM x2 = 96GB
Storage1TB NVMe SSD Gen4
CaseDeskmini x600

  1. Old laptop (dell xps 13 2015) which was repurposed as a low power backup server.

  2. Using a repurposed HP tower as a NAS (Network Attached Storage).

Network

Router alone can be a good starter if there are few devices on the network. I added the switch for faster networking between devices. Pretty basic, but it works.

ComponentsDescription
Router1GbE Router
Switch2.5GbE Switch

Storage

Used HDDs which are spun down when not in use. SSDs for booting and caching.

Graphics

The RDNA2 iGPU in the Ryzen 9 7900 is sufficient for most tasks in my home lab setup. It has VCN 3.0 (H265/HEVC encode/decode, AV1 decode. No AV1 encode) support, which allows for hardware-accelerated video encoding and decoding that supports making it suitable for media streaming and transcoding tasks.

I don’t have a dedicated GPU in my home lab setup, but if you want to run GPU-intensive workloads, you can consider adding a dedicated GPU to your server or workstation.

In the future, I plan to add a dedicated GPU for machine learning and AI workloads via oculink the extra m.2 PCIe slot on the Deskmini x600

I think I’ll await the Intel Arc B50 that should be a available in Q3 2025. In the 70W power envelope, it has 16GB VRAM. Enough to load upto 7B/13B models quantized.

What are some home lab projects?

Heard of AWS? Azure? GCP? Well, you can have your own cloud at home with a home lab.

  1. Home automation: I have been running Home Assistant on the Deskmini with a Sonoff Zigbee USB dongle for about a year now to control all the smart devices in my home.

    1. Motion sensors (lights toggle on motion detection)
    2. Power plugs
    3. Smart bulbs
    4. Door sensors (safety and security)

  2. Virtualization: I use Proxmox VE to run virtual machines and containers on my home lab setup. New OS in town? Spin up a VM and try it out without affecting your main system.

  3. Network monitoring: Use tools like Pi-hole or AdGuard to block ads and track network activity. I have been using AdGuard Home for ad-blocking and network monitoring in my home lab setup.

I could like million other things, but literally sky is the limit.

What are some home lab resources?

  1. Proxmox VE Helper-Scripts - If you go Proxmox route for homelab. An extensive collection of scripts to help you manage your Proxmox VE environment. I keep coming back to this repo for scripts that help me manage my Proxmox VE environment. These also have easy update scripts that help managing the Proxmox VE environment.

  2. Youtube Channels: These channels go into depth that one person cannot cover in a single blog post.

    • Level1Techs - Covers a wide range of topics including home lab setups, hardware reviews, and technology news.
    • Techno Tim - Focuses on home lab projects and tutorials.

    There are many more channels, but these two are my go-to channels for home lab content.

Power consumption

I have a Ecoflow River 3 that kinda acts as a UPS to my homelab setup. It has a 256Wh capacity and can power my home lab setup for about 4-5 hours.

And some of these ThirdReality Zigbee plugs that I use to monitor the power consumption of my home lab setup.

My NAS + Servers consume about 50-70W on idle load and then ramps to about 120-150W on heavy load.

So, where I live, at ~50 cents per kWh. I know :(. My home lab setup costs about $0.03 (3 cents) per hour to run. That’s about $0.6 (60 cents) per day on average. Your calculation depends on your local electricity rates. Cost per hour = (Power in kW) × (Electricity rate in $/kWh)

Cost 50W = (50 × 24 / 1000) × 0.5 = 0.6 USD per day (90% of the time)

Cost 70W = 0.84 USD per day (idle load costs)

Cost 150W = 1.8 USD per day (full load costs, very rare)

So, now the goal is to reduce the power consumption or add Solar panels to the ecoflow and get the 110W Max it can take in. Or get rid of old PC and replace it with a more power-efficient Intel n100 boards for NAS.

Maybe I will add some KVM to power on/off servers not in use.

But for now, the performance and flexibility of my home lab setup outweighs the power consumption costs.

Final thoughts

If you are a tinkerer, a hobbyist, or just someone who wants to learn more about technology, a home lab can be a great way to do so.

Also the barrier to entry is very low. It can start with old PC/laptop lying around at home.

Or get something used via your favorite e-tailer or local marketplace.

Have fun experimenting, learning, and building your own home lab setup.