Guides

Plain-English guides to planning, building and running a mini homelab. Start with the basics, choose your hardware, and build something useful.

TEN-FOUR specs, drawings & CAD (8U) Explore the rack in 3D

Diagram of a Home Assistant box and a small web app side by side, joined by an MQTT broker, with the app's summary sensors flowing into Home Assistant and a wall tablet showing the app.

Home Assistant dashboards hitting their limits?...

Home Assistant is brilliant at devices and automations. It's less good at being a chores list, a meal planner or anything with forms and rules. Here's how to split the...

Home Assistant dashboards hitting their limits?...

Home Assistant is brilliant at devices and automations. It's less good at being a chores list, a meal planner or anything with forms and rules. Here's how to split the...

Six project cards climbing like stairs from left to right: AdGuard Home, Home Assistant, backups, media server, monitoring and remote access, with 'start here' under the first.

Beginner homelab projects: where to start

Six projects in the order we'd do them: network-wide ad blocking with AdGuard Home, Home Assistant, proper backups, a media server, uptime monitoring and safe remote access. What each one...

Beginner homelab projects: where to start

Six projects in the order we'd do them: network-wide ad blocking with AdGuard Home, Home Assistant, proper backups, a media server, uptime monitoring and safe remote access. What each one...

Diagram of Home Assistant on a small box with a USB radio on an extension lead, talking over Zigbee and Thread to a door sensor, a temperature sensor and a smart plug, with phone, lights and backups linked on the other side.

Home Assistant on a mini homelab: what to run i...

Home Assistant is where a lot of homelabs start, and the one most likely to annoy the household when it breaks. Here's what to run it on, which install type...

Home Assistant on a mini homelab: what to run i...

Home Assistant is where a lot of homelabs start, and the one most likely to annoy the household when it breaks. Here's what to run it on, which install type...

Exploded drawing of a 2020 aluminium extrusion rack frame: four uprights, top and bottom rails, three-way corner connectors and two rack rails, with a T-nut and screw shown enlarged.

Build your own 10" rack from 2020 extrusion, or...

A 10" rack is a short parts list: extrusion, corner connectors, two rack rails, T-nuts and screws. Here's what building one yourself involves, where it goes wrong, and when the...

Build your own 10" rack from 2020 extrusion, or...

A 10" rack is a short parts list: extrusion, corner connectors, two rack rails, T-nuts and screws. Here's what building one yourself involves, where it goes wrong, and when the...

Side section of a closed rack: cool air enters low at the front, passes through three pieces of gear, and warm air leaves through an 80 mm fan in the top panel, with a blank panel sealing a gap at the front.

Cooling and noise in a closed mini rack

Every watt your gear draws ends up as heat in the box. Open racks mostly look after themselves; closed ones need a path for the air. Here's how to keep...

Cooling and noise in a closed mini rack

Every watt your gear draws ends up as heat in the box. Open racks mostly look after themselves; closed ones need a path for the air. Here's how to keep...

Diagram from a wall outlet to a UPS feeding six devices directly, with example wattages adding up to 73 W, and a crossed-out power board plugged into another power board.

Powering a mini homelab: power boards, PDUs and...

Add up the watts, plug into one decent power board (not a chain of them), and if you want the lights to stay on through a blip, size a UPS...

Powering a mini homelab: power boards, PDUs and...

Add up the watts, plug into one decent power board (not a chain of them), and if you want the lights to stay on through a blip, size a UPS...