My Fourth Homelab Setup (2023)

Well, in 2022 electricity prices in the UK literally doubled, so it was time for me to do another home energy audit.  My Homelab is "always on", so is an obvious focus for energy efficiency improvements.  Whilst the thin client I was using for my Homelab is pretty energy efficient, at around 7 watts idle, I started looking at single board computers (SBCs).

The Raspberry Pi 4 is around 4 watts at idle, so definitely a good improvement.  But I was not keen on running a home server from an SD card, which is the normal way to set up a Pi.  After some research I found a great kit for the Pi 4 that includes an SSD interface board, cooling fan + controller board and metal case to make a professional-looking SBC setup.

For this setup, I was not using Proxmox any more, as I could do everything I needed via Docker containers.  The setup was helped even more by the fact that I had offloaded some of my key applications onto a Oracle Cloud Server (more on this in a later blog!).  Another key development, was the discovery of IOTstack, hosted by Graham Garner.  This is basically a management tool for the most common docker containers used in a Homelab setup.  It includes the quartet of mosquitto, node red, grafana and influxdb, as well as a host of other commonly used applications, such as portainer, nextcloud, etc.  It also includes a backup (and restore) tool, to help make the management of your setup more robust.